i am having problems understanding totally how smarty works, but I have read the crash course at smarty's site. what I am trying to do is make a block that shows the News topics, currently there is a combobox/form based menu for topics. I want each topic to be printed out and clickable, Like the main menu is. So I started editing the news_block_topics.html template which currently has:




from looking at other blocks I know what types of syntax I will need to use like a "foreach" statement for each topic in the news. Kinda like:




however, even when I copy this code into the news_block_topics.html file and run it, it doesn't work.

My confusion is mostl with accessing variables, I don't know what is accessible and also how a statement like works. I need, general confusion for me, but I am trying to learn by getting this block working.

thanks,
Shawn

You have worked out how Smarty works, but you need to understand how XOOPS works too. I am afraid that the answer is not simple, but here goes...

An XOOPS block is defined in its module's xoops_version.php file. The block that uses the template you are modifying is defined like this:

When XOOPS has to display the block, it uses the above definition to include the file modules/news/blocks/news_topics.php, call the function b_news_topics_show() and fetch the template news_block_topics.html.

This means that in the template you are modifying, the smarty $block variable is set up by the code in the function b_news_topics_show() in the file news_topics.php. If you want to access different data (like the stories data you have copied from news_block_top.html) you have to make sure that this data is loaded into smarty by your PHP code. Again using xoops_version.php, you can see that the code you need is in news_top.php.

I hope this is enough to get you started...