How does it all work?

[Ctwizzy]

Im trying to figure out serendipity so if any vets wana throw in some assistance id appreciate it.

So the style.css file controls the layout of the site, thats fine. But I want to see the default template to see the tags so I can see what exactly the css is affecting. So I was reading the documentation and it seems that layout.php is where everything is done, and that if one does not exist its in /default/. So I browse to default and its not there....

Where is the file that has all the html/php all the div tags so that if I wanted I could change the way the CSS affects stuff? Is everything done via plugins? What if I want to manually rip out the Calander code where should I be looking? I understand there are a lot of plugins to do this stuff, but Id actually like to know how it all works before I start using plugins.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

"layout.php" is deprecated, this is the old way of Serendipity.

Since serendipity 0.8, we use the Smarty templating system. Smarty templates are able to contain some easy control logic like IF and FOREACH.

The files are kept in the /templates/XXX directory. The templates/default/ directory contains all the default styles. If you want to create a new template, take that directory for your start and then modify all the things you want. After that you can delete all files you did not modify; Serendipity will then pull the default .tpl files automatically from your default directory, so you won't have duplicate files.

The index.tpl template is the main template file, and entries.tpl contains all the output for entry contents. The .tpl files indicate the HTML classnames that the style.css file is able to use.

HTH,
Garvin