title: Magento: relationship between template files and the layout XML file
body: <p>I see that the callouts template (files in frontend\my_package\default\template\callouts) doesn't have a corresponding layout XML file (frontend\my_package\default\layout). So, I thought if I have a blank layout XML file at frontend\my_package\default\layout\callouts.xml, this will disable the callout block on the Magento front page. However, it doesn't work.</p>
  
  <p>The checkout template does have a checkout.xml layout file, so making this a blank file removes the checkout out block from the page I'm looking at. For the checkout block case, does the checkout.xml override what is called from the active catalog.xml? I don't remove the corresponding lines from catalog.xml, but the blank checkout.xml file will disable this block regardless.</p>
  
  <p>I know that removing corresponding lines for whatever blocks in catalog.xml removes/doesn't load what I want on the web page, but I'd like to find out why my attempt to "override" callouts isn't working. TIA!</p>
  
  <p>Note: I already have caching disabled.</p>