OK,
I've moved much further along. The query is being executed and bringing back the resutls I want (I echoed them from the query and they showed up on my page), However, they are not displaying in the template file I have created. Right now I have this is my template file:
{section name=news loop=$newsItems}
Title: {$newsItems.title}
{/section}
this is my php file:
<?
$dbCon=mysql_connect("host","user","pass") or die("Could not connect to the database");
mysql_select_db($dBName,$dbCon);
$SQLCon="SELECT title,ID,description,category,date FROM articles WHERE visible = 1 AND date<=NOW() AND category<>10 ORDER BY date DESC, ID DESC LIMIT 7 ";
$newsItems=mysql_query($SQLCon);
//while ($rs=mysql_fetch_array($newsItems))
// {
// echo "
$rs[title] | $rs[date]
\n";
// echo "$rs[description]\n";
// echo "
\n";
// }
$smarty->assign("newsItems",$newsItems);
?>
Thanks again...