View source for Understanding Output Overrides

=== Overriding Sub-Layouts ===

In some views you will see that some of the layouts have a group of files that start with the same name. The category view has an example of this. The blog layout actually has three parts: the main layout file blog.php and two sub-layout files, blog_item.php and blog_links.php. You can see where these sub-layouts are loaded in the blog.php file using the loadTemplate method, for example:
<source lang="php">
echo $this->loadTemplate('item');
// or
echo $this->loadTemplate('links');
</source>
When loading sub-layouts, the view already knows what layout you are in, so you don't have to provide the prefix (that is, you load just 'item', not 'blog_item').

What is important to note here is that it is possible to override just a sub-layout without copying the whole set of files. For example, if you were happy with the Joomla! default output for the blog layout, but just wanted to customise the item sub-layout, you could just copy:

<pre>/components/com_content/views/category/tmpl/blog_item.php</pre>

to:

<pre>/templates/rhuk_milkyway/html/com_content/category/blog_item.php</pre>

When Joomla! is parsing the view, it will automatically know to load blog.php from com_content natively and blog_item.php from your template overrides.