[Jagmeister]

I am just getting started with my site and would like some help trying to figure out the overall structure. I have never worked with a template based system and am wondering why I would want to bother with "another" layer of code <sigh> Hopefully, once I get used to it I will be glad I made the plunge.

I am reasonably familiar with php, html, css, etc. and once I figure out how the templates fit into the picture I will be on my way. I will be editing the files with a text editor, not the built-in editor.

So... a few questions:

1. From what little I have learned the Smarty system uses templates which then create the php files that are actually served up to the browser. This implies that I should always edit the template files and not the php files. True or False?

2. So to change the look of my site... in which directory(s) are these template files located? Skin1?

3. It seems that a customer will initially launch index.php which redirects to home.php which pulls in a number of includes and finally runs a smarty function to display the customer/home template which appears to call ../home.php. This seems to be a little recursive but ignoring that for the moment I'm guessing the page gets built from the includes? (For the moment I just want to concentrate on the home page.)

4. Is there any sort of a "wiring diagram" for how the whole "x-xart" is put together?

Thanks,

Matt