Suppressing sidebox display on specific pages

Example 1: I want to display the featured sidebox on my front page only, and suppress it from all other pages.

Create an override for the sidebox’s module file. For the featured products sidebox, this would involve copying includes/modules/sideboxes/featured_products.php to includes/modules/sideboxes/YOURTEMPLATE/featured_products.php.

Open up your new sidebox module file and take a look at the code. Generally it will look something like this

<?php  

BIG COMMENT BLOCK  

// test if box should display  
  $show_featured= true;  

  if ($show_featured == true) {  

    // MAIN PROCESSING BLOCK  

  }  
?>

All we need to do is to change the line that reads

$show_featured= true;

into

  if ($this_is_home_page) {  
    $show_featured = true;  
  } else {  
    $show_featured = false;  
  }

If your sidebox module doesn’t have a conditional such as if ($show_featured == true) { ... } wrapped around the code, then just add it (changing the variable name to something suitable and unique for your sidebox to avoid unintentionally turning off other sideboxes).

Example 2: I do not want to display any sideboxes on the checkout pages.

Modify the file includes/templates/YOURTEMPLATE/common/tpl_main_page.php.

Add this after the comment block at the top of the file:

if (in_array($current_page_base,explode(",",'checkout_shipping,checkout_payment,checkout_confirmation,checkout_success')) ) {
  $flag_disable_right = true;
  $flag_disable_left = true;
}

Example 3: I want all the sideboxes on the right removed.

Turning off each of the sideboxes set to display on the right in Admin > Tools > Layout Boxes Controllers is not enough. You need to reclaim the space by going to Admin > Configuration > Layout Settings and setting Column Right Status - Global to 0.