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Chapter 2
° ° template: This property determines the .phtml template file, which
will be used for rendering the block.
° ° action: Each block type has specific actions that affect the frontend
functionality. For instance, the page/html_head block, which has
actions for adding CSS and JavaScript (addJs and addCss).
° ° as: This is used to specify the unique identifier that we will be using
for calling the block from the template, for example calling a child
block by using getChildHtml('block_name').
Blocks are a new concept that Magento implements in order to reduce the controller
load. They are basically data resources that communicate directly with the models,
which manipulate the data, if needed, and then pass it to the views.
Finally, we have our PHTML files; the templates contain the html and php tags and
are in charge of formatting and displaying the data from our models. Let's take a
look at a snippet from the product view template:
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