This question doesn't quite make sense to an experienced Magento developer. Hopefully explaining why it doesn't make sense help you find the solution to your problem.
First, your path for local.xml
is incorrect
/design/default/layout/local.xml
Magento's structure here is
app/design/frontend/package-name/theme-name/layout/local.xml
You're missing the package and/or theme name from your path. That makes it hard to give you advice here — are you sure Magento sees your local.xml
file? (making it invalid XML and reloading looking for an error is a quick way to test this)
Secondly, you said you're using getChildHtml
to render the block — but at the same time you're adding it to the content
block. The content
block is a test/list
block that will automatically render any block added to it. The content
block has no phtml
template, therefore you can't call getChildHtml
. Where are you calling getChildHtml
from?