Noob question

[AppleCider]

Okay, I'm new to Serendipity....right now I'm just checking it out.

I'm a designer and I know CSS fairly well. However, I don't see any "skinning" documentation, which may well be a different process. Also...I know this is gonna sound idiotic to some here, but what is "Smarty"?

If someone can point me to some good docs on how to skin Serendiptiy, I'd really appreciate it!

[azel]

Tell you what, you should check out some of the members' sites, like carlgalloway, Yellowled, lordcoffee, d_cee, mgroeninger (forgive me if I missed anyone). Carl's site offers tutorials, and I'm fairly certain many of those other sites do as well.

As for smarty, here is a short explanation: "A library that allows the creation of HTML templates that are imported and used in PHP scripts to ease the process of web page design."

[yellowled]

I'm a designer and I know CSS fairly well. However, I don't see any "skinning" documentation, which may well be a different process.

http://www.s9y.org/40.html

Basically, there's two componets to change the looks of a blog powered by s9y - CSS and ...

Also...I know this is gonna sound idiotic to some here, but what is "Smarty"?

... Smarty, a template engine for PHP. For elaborate docs on Smarty, see http://smarty.php.net/. However, Smarty is not necessary to change the looks of a s9y blog, but is used to modify the HTML output of s9y without having to edit the s9y core.

I hope I explained this well. If not, someone should correct me.

If you're happy with the default HTML output, you can very well create a new look (a so-called "theme", "style" or "template") using CSS only. Unfortunately, the default theme still uses tables for layout purposes, so you might want to check out some of the tableless templates available on spartacus.

The safe way to getting to know s9y templates for you is probably to take a look at the commented default theme stylesheet.

Feel free to ask further questions here

YL