New to templates and Smarty - please help

[MajorMoj0]

Hi, I'm new to the Smarty engine and WHMCS. I've used wordpress before and have developed in c#, but this system is baffling me. I have the Antler theme and I can't even figure out the basics of how to customize my website. Is there somewhere that I can find documentation or a tutorial on how to customize a theme? Everything seems to be about creating a theme from scratch, which I doubt most people do. For example, Header.tpl seems to have a lot of different modules or features in it, but then theres a ton of other tpl files. Please send help. 

[brian!]

12 hours ago, MajorMoj0 said:

I have the Antler theme and I can't even figure out the basics of how to customize my website.

your first port of call for that should be to contact Antler's developers - looks like they'll answer header/footer customisation, but beyond that you might need to look beyond them.

12 hours ago, MajorMoj0 said:

Is there somewhere that I can find documentation or a tutorial on how to customize a theme?

For Antler - http://inebur.com/antler/documentation/index.html

generically - https://developers.whmcs.com/themes/customising/

12 hours ago, MajorMoj0 said:

Everything seems to be about creating a theme from scratch, which I doubt most people do.

I doubt it too - most users will either customise/personalise the default "Six" template, or they'll do what you did and buy a commercial template.... if you need to tweak Antler, then it's developers will (or should!) know more than anyone here on how to do that.

12 hours ago, MajorMoj0 said:

For example, Header.tpl seems to have a lot of different modules or features in it, but then there's a ton of other tpl files.

what i'm about to say is an oversimplification, but basically a WHMCS page consists of 3 Smarty templates - the header (header.tpl), the body of the page (e.g one of the other templates in  Six/Antler) and the footer (footer.tpl) - Antler will be using a customised version of header.tpl and footer.tpl... I would imagine the other templates will be very similar to those shipped with Six.

looking at the Antler header.tpl, for the most part, it's just HTML and hardcoded text - there's very little additional Smarty in there and probably nothing with regards to Smarty that you would ever need to change... what sort of customising do you have in mind ?