title: Adding a new reference block to Magento
body: <p>I'm having some trouble getting a custom Reference block to work in Magento.</p>
  
  <p>These are the steps I have taken:</p>
  
  <p><strong>Step 1</strong></p>
  
  <p>Created a new “Reference” block in page.xml</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;block type="core/text_list" name="newreference" as="newreference"&gt;&lt;/block&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Step 2</strong></p>
  
  <p>Added a reference to this block in the place I want it to appear in the page (above the footer in 1column.phtml, 2columns-left.phtml, 2columns-right.phtml, 3columns.phtml)</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php $this-&gt;getChildHtml('newreference'); ?&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Step 3</strong></p>
  
  <p>Added a reference to catalog.xml which tells Magento I want to output a template part (specialfooter.phtml) in the ‘newreference’ Reference block on Category pages</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;reference name="newreference"&gt;
       &lt;block type="core/template" name="specialfooter" template="page/html/specialfooter.phtml"&gt;&lt;/block&gt;
  &lt;/reference&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Step 4</strong></p>
  
  <p>Created ‘specialfooter.phtml’ in the page/html/ directory with a simple paragraph block to test.</p>
  
  <p>And nothing happens. </p>
  
  <p>The steps I have taken fit with my understanding of how Reference blocks work, but I could be wrong. I'm struggling to find any documentation, official or otherwise, or any previous SO questions which sheds any light on the subject.</p>
  
  <p>I'm using Magento ver. 1.7.0.2.</p>
  
  <p>Any help would be much appreciated.</p>