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Newbie editing in Concrete5

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Hi everybody! I'm slowly starting to become more and more comfortable with HTML and CSS (very slowly), and I want to experiment with a few changes to my currently installed theme, which has no customization options available from the main C5 panel. I found the full styles.css file easily, but I do not understand how I can edit the main index.php file. Whenever I try to open it, I get a request for dispatcher.php, and beyond that I'm pretty clueless. Basically, I'm trying to access the file that contains all the code I see when I right click on my home page, and select "View Page Source." Thank you!
 
beebs93 replied on at Permalink Reply
beebs93
What you're looking for are the theme's template files. I'm not sure which theme you're using, but in the default core C5 themes they have default template files such as default.php, page.php, full.php, etc.

They are located in SITE_ROOT/themes/yourthemefolder/ and tend to follow this very basic layout:

<?php defined('C5_EXECUTE') or die("Access Denied.");
$this->inc('elements/header.php'); ?>
<!-- HTML and PHP code here -->
<?php $this->inc('elements/footer.php'); ?>


Each page built in C5 is usually based on a template file (unless it's a single page, but worry about that later).

If you just want to tweak the HTML then by all means tinker, but if you've never used PHP then it's time to study if you really want to get into theme modifications/creation.