Serendipity Forums

Okay, here's my situation. I'm an amateur web designer and I know HTML. I'm trying to start a blog and the guy who runs my server says I need a PHP blog program. I find Serendipity and it's awesome. I have it installed on the server correctly.

But my problem is that I want to use my own design with the blog. You can see a mockup of the design I want to use at http://www.christianthinker.net/temp.php. I understand that the way you customize Serendipity is with the .tpl files in the default template folder, but when I open those up it is like reading Greek to me.

I've also read what it says at http://www.s9y.org/44.html about how to do this but I just don't get it. So, two questions:

1) Is it possible for me to get the design I want even though I only know HTML and not PHP?
2) If so, how exactly is that done?

And by the way, I just want to do it with HTML, and not CSS. I know a little about CSS but not much.

Thanks!
Brian

Strider, all things are possible with Serendipity.

Of course, you'll want to move all those sidebars to the left side of the page in your S9Y configuration. (As I recall, they're right-side by default.) The "Topics" and "Culture" sidebars would probably be best handled as category plugins with different bases, but the rest look like link-lists to me.

The "popular threads" seems more suitable to a forum than a blog, but I've heard discussion within these forums of plugins for almost exactly this sort of thing; a Karma plugin, I believe (but I'm sure someone will point you in the correct direction soon).

As to the colors, layout, etc... yes, it can be done. Some learning will be involved: you'll either need to learn Smarty templating or CSS. Both would be best, of course.

Smarty is at http://smarty.php.net/, and it's a lot like programming. You could define the exact HTML you expect, then use Smarty to create it. Not too bad for the beginner, simplicity itself if you've done any coding before.

CSS would allow you to achieve similar results, but getting it exact would likely require some Smarty work, too.

I'd recommend copying the "default" template directory to a new location, then messing with the individual templates you need. I'd start with sidebar.tpl, since your concept page is mostly sidebars. The {foreach} command just loops through every sidebar in turn. The {if} checks to make sure the sidebar currently under consideration has a title; if not, it doesn't print a title. Anything that's not in curly-braces {} gets printed exactly as HTML.

The {$item.content} creates the inside of the box. Unfortunately, each box creates its own content, so you'll probably need to use some CSS to achieve the proper colors, spacing, etc.