Magento - Beware of the dog

Hey guys and gals

One question I get asked quite a lot is "How do I get rid of that dog from my magento?". I thought I'd share the answer with the community:

Its quite a simple process to remove the callouts from the default pages of magento, (this includes the "back to school" image) you just need to know where to look.

Magento is built on a number of template files called .phtml files, these are used to control the look and feel of a many number of pages in magento. For the dog we are looking for a folder called "callouts".

If you are using the default theme you can find this folder here:
app/design/frontend/default/default/template/callouts

For other themes the first "default" part of the path will match your theme/skin name.

In that folder you will find two files: left_col.phtml & right_col.phtml edit these files to change the look of the side columns on the pages. If you want to remove the dog image you are looking for a line that contains the image name: col_left_callout.jpg

swap this image or remove it and the dog is gone! (but its still hiding somewhere )

You'll also find the dog in the 404 page! (he gets around this dog ) You can remove him from the 404 page via the admin interface.

Go to you CMS section and select the 404 page, in here on the last line will be a link to the dog image, once again update or remove to be rid of the dog.

Hope this helps a few of you