[balinor]

I too was once a newb. I started my first cart not knowing anything about PHP/Smarty/MySQL. It just takes patience, and a few very frustrating hurdles to cross. Whenever I would get to a point like you are at now, I would just walk away from the computer for a couple hours, have a beer, and come back. Usually it is something as simple as a mis-placed piece of punctuation or mis-spelling that can wreck your whole day.