Random banner in Magento 1 using static blocks

The banners are an inevitable part of any E-Commerce store. They help to increase our sales by promoting new products, special offers & discounts etc.

Today I’m going to make a simple random banner in our Magento powered online store with static blocks and template files.

• To add a random banner in Magento stores, first add few static blocks from administration panel (CMS->Static Blocks->Add new block).

• When creating this static block, follow a common Identifier naming scheme for all these static block like

  BannerIdentifier_1
  BannerIdentifier_2
  BannerIdentifier_3
  BannerIdentifier_4
  ...
  BannerIdentifier_N
  

• Normally we use images as banner & so insert our banner image on each static block.

• Then wrap that image using anchor tag that target our specific page, product or category like

  <a href="http://mystore.com/my_new_product/"><img src="" alt="Some alt text"  /></a>
  

• Now we just added an image link as our banner. But we have option to add text, buttons etc on that image with some CSS tricks & now that is purely off topic for me.

• Then add a single line of code in our template file to echo a random static block.

  <?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock('cms/block')->setBlockId('BannerIdentifier_'.mt_rand(1, N))->toHtml() ?>
  

Here we use a PHP function, mt_rand() to achieve our goal. The mt_rand() return a random integer value between one and N because our parameters for mt_rand() function is one & N.

We use this returned integer value as a part of our static block identifier & echo that static block on that page.

To view our random banner, flesh the Magento cache and reload the store.

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This article was published on June 7, 2014

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