If you're trying to make it work within the template / phtml files, and/or inside the Block's class you're going to have a hard time. Mainly because magento (aggressively) caches your PHTML blocks for performance purposes thus undoing any program flow control statements you have especially stuff related with cookie checking. I have no direct / lengthy / indepth explanation why but that's just how I've encountered it over and over again.
However, your solution should be correct, but you need to do the check within a controller's preDispatch method like so to avoid the aformentioned aggressive caches since controllers are never cached. (shown in Nick's solution in the question that you linked.):
// Ensure we're in the admin session namespace for checking the admin user..
Mage::getSingleton('core/session', array('name' => 'adminhtml'))->start();
$admin_logged_in = Mage::getSingleton('admin/session', array('name' => 'adminhtml'))->isLoggedIn();
// ..get back to the original.
Mage::getSingleton('core/session', array('name' => $this->_sessionNamespace))->start();
IF you really do need to perform the above checks inside PHTML files or named blocks, check out the following code on how to turn off block-level caching and possibly make it work. What I did before was disable caching for the footer block (in which the child block, not phtml, contains code to check
for a specific cookie)
First off, the block call (found in your local.xml, or module layout update xml, or anywhere you can do layout updates, really. I prefer breaking up my customizations into modules so definitely module layout update xml is the way to go):
<reference name="footer">
<action method="unsetData"><key>cache_lifetime</key></action>
<action method="unsetData"><key>cache_tags</key></action>
<block type="newsletterpopup/popup" name="newsletterpopup_footer" template="newsletterpopup/popup.phtml"/>
</reference>
And this is the newsletterpopup's block class:
<?php
class Launchpad_Newsletterpopup_Block_Popup extends Mage_Core_Block_Template {
public function canRender() {
// Check if cookie exists here
}
public function afterRender() { // if block has rendered, this is called.
// Set cookie, if it doesn't exist here.
}
}
And the phtml would be something like:
<?php if($this->canRender()): ?>
// stuff
<?php endif; ?>
Good luck!
