new2blogging wrote: ↑Tue Feb 19, 2019 9:34 am
I would like to customize the current TIMELINE theme by hard coding whatever needs to be done within the respective php template files.
First heads-up: s9y uses Smarty templates – under the hood it's PHP, and if you absolutely wanted to, you could use PHP templates, but it's not really common. Smarty is an additional template layer which basically makes it easier for beginners to get into templating. With a little PHP knowledge, you should be able to get by. (I still suck at PHP, but I can manage in Smarty.)
new2blogging wrote: ↑Tue Feb 19, 2019 9:34 am
I would really appreciate it if someone could point me to the correct files in order to attain global changes for the blog's front end.
Well, you obviously have found out how to adapt the CSS. Bad news is you don't seem to have found out about adding your changes to a new file called user.css, but let's not get a head of ourselves.
Something you'll want to make sure when you change a theme is to make your changes safe in case of an update. The timeline theme is part of s9y, so the next update to s9y will overwrite all your changes. It is recommended to "fork" timeline, which is actually pretty simple.
1. copy /templates/timeline/ and all its content to something to your liking, for example /templates/my_theme/
2. open /templates/my_theme/info.txt in a text editor and change at least the name; you can also change the author etc. since you're now editing your own theme
3. switch to your new forked theme in the backend
4. make your changes in /templates/my_theme from now on
Since /templates/my_theme is
not part of s9y, it's safe in case of an update.
As for what to change where,
https://docs.s9y.org/docs/developers/themes.html will hopefully help a lot. And since you can read German, take a look at
https://github.com/s9y/Book/blob/master/serendipity.pdf – that's a whole book on s9y written by our lead dev Garvin. It's a bit older, but most of it should still work.
I'll get into details about your specific questions in a new post to keep this readable.
YL