Magento. Display new products on the home page (XML)

This tutorial will show you how to display new products on the home page using the XML layout update.

Open Magento admin panel. Go to CMS>Pages>Home Page.  Switch to the Design tab. Into the Layout Update XML window paste the following code:

1. First of all create the content reference:

  <reference  name="content">

  </reference>

This will let you put the blocks into the home page content area.

2. Insert the new products block:

  <block  type="catalog/product_new" name="product_new"  template="catalog/product/list.phtml">

</block> 

The block code should be inserted into the reference tag.

3. Set the number of the product columns in the new products listing:

<action  method="setColumnCount"><column_count>6</column_count></action>

The action code should be inserted into the block  tag.

4. Set the amount of products displayed in the new products block:

<action  method="setProductsCount"><count>0</count></action>

As a result your XML code should look like this:

  <reference  name="content">

  <block  type="catalog/product_new" name="product_new"  template="catalog/product/list.phtml">

  <action  method="setColumnCount"><column_count>6</column_count></action>

  <action  method="setProductsCount"><count>0</count></action>

  </block>

  </reference>

In case you want to display the new products from the specific category use the following action:

  <action  method="setCategoryId"><category_id>10</category_id></action>

Make sure you set the correct category ID value. You can get the category ID from the admin panel>Catalog>Manage categories.

We recommend clear and disable the Magento cache when editing the static pages.