How to Customize the Customer Dashboard for your Magento Store?

Do you like the default customer dashboard that you get with Magento? Do you think it fulfills your needs to the perfection? There may be things that don't come with the default dashboard.

Let's take a scenario into consideration while discussing this. A particular store wants to showcase a set of products and catalog to their registered users, but don't want these products to be displayed to the non-registered people. They will need to customize the dashboard to meet their requirements. Let's understand how this happens.

Go to dashboard.phtml; this file is located along the following path: /app/design/frontend/default/yourtemplate/template/customer/account/ and modify it to customize the dashboard. Along with dashboard.phtml, you will also need to customize customer.xml which is located along the path /app/design/frontend/default/yourtemplate/layout/

Once you have customized these two paths, you will need to add a separate file, download_links.phtml and save it to the folder downloadlinks along the path /app/design/frontend/default/yourtemplate/template/

Let's see what customizations you need to make to customize the customer dashboard of your store

Go to dashboard.phtml

You will see the following code

After making this change in dashboard.phtml, you will need to modify customer.xml

You will need to add the following code within the reference block near line 209

Once this has been done, you will need to look into the new folder that you have created download_links.phtml. here you can add php code or run a simple html code. Once you have added the necessary links, your block will look like this