actually they helped me figure it out. it was a permission issue on my root www directory.

Thanks a lot for all your help Garvin. I really appreciate it.

Garvin,

I am posting here my communication with one of my admins. Please let me know what you think.

Also, I tried the simple php file you gave me and it worked when I run it on command line.

Thanks,
Shayan

==============================================
> Guys,
>
> I am having trouble using ...

Garvin,

The directory exists and contains files

shayan@leary(~/www/ideas/templates/idea)$ pwd
/home/shayan/www/ideas/templates/idea
shayan@leary(~/www/ideas/templates/idea)$ ls -lad .
drwxr-xr-x 3 shayan users 512 Apr 15 16:30 .
shayan@leary(~/www/ideas/templates/idea)$

I am running on OpenBSD 3 ...

Sorry about the late reply.

Here is what I get when I change the file:

Realpath is :
Matching against /home/shayan/www/ideas/templates/idea ==
No match.
No matches.
Matching against secure dir /home/shayan/www/ideas/templates/ ==
No match.
No matches.
Access denied.

Warning: Smarty error: (secure ...

I don't think that is the problem

shayan@leary(~/www/ideas/bundled-libs/Smarty/libs)$ ls -l
total 352
-rw-r--r-- 1 shayan users 12717 Apr 1 03:38 Config_File.class.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 shayan users 62932 Apr 1 03:38 Smarty.class.php
-rw-r--r-- 1 shayan users 90750 Apr 1 03:38 Smarty_Compiler.class.php ...

You were right. My configuration options were messed up (I installed under a directory other than serendipity).

Now that I have fixed them at least the configuration pages are rendered nicly (before it was a raw html page; text only; old lynx format :)). However, I still get a very similar error ...