Magento development: Show minicart/sidebar with totals on checkout

One of the great features available in default Magento is one page checkout. However, the bad point is that you can see your actual cart totals only on last step of checkout (order confirmation). Lets try to make totals visible during whole checkout process, it will look this way:

I assume that you have your own custom theme. Please do not modify files in app/design/frontend/base/default/ & app/design/frontend/default/default/, modify only your custom theme files.

Step1.
You need to modify file app/design/frontend/{your package}/{your theme}/layout/checkout.xml

Find the following code:

     ....................
                

Replace the second line with the following code:

            
                simplecheckout/cart_item_renderer
                groupedcheckout/cart_item_renderer_grouped
                configurablecheckout/cart_item_renderer_configurable
            

We just expanded the right-side progress column with our block which will render our totals.

Step 2.

In the same file, find the following code:

.....
        
            
                
            

and insert the same block inside checkout progress block:

            
                
            

            
                simplecheckout/cart_item_renderer
                groupedcheckout/cart_item_renderer_grouped
                configurablecheckout/cart_item_renderer_configurable
            

Step 3.

Now we need to create a template file which will render our totals. It will be a file app/design/frontend/{your package}/{your theme}/template/checkout/onepage/review/totals_right.phtml

Place the following code in the file

getTotals()): ?>
    

        __('Your Order') ?> | Change
    
    

        helper('tax')->displayCartBothPrices() ? 5 : 3; ?>
        renderTotals(null, $_colspan); ?>
        renderTotals('footer', $_colspan); ?>
        needDisplayBaseGrandtotal()):?>
        

        

            

                helper('sales')->__('Your credit card will be charged for') ?>
            
            

                displayBaseGrandtotal() ?>
            
        
        
        
    

Step 4.

The last thing we should do is to call the rendering of our totals block in right progress column. You need to open file app/design/frontend/{your package}/{your theme}/template/checkout/onepage/progress.phtml

and find the following code:

        

        getCheckout()->getStepData('billing', 'is_show')): ?>

and insert one line for the totals rendering:

        

        getChildHtml('total_sidebar');?>
        getCheckout()->getStepData('billing', 'is_show')): ?>

That's it. The good thing is that the totals we just inserted will be refreshed when you go to the next checkout step automatically using Ajax.