Basically, the pages are generated by SPIP from the articles articles
are converted from SPIP syntax to HTML.

When displaying an article, SPIP uses the article-#.html template
(where # is the category number) or article.html if article-#.html
does not exist..

In this template, there are SPIP-specific instructions, such as
"include that other template"

In my current structure, there is one category per webpage, plus one
category for all walkthroughs.

The category # is the 'folder' that the page is in, in the admin
interface (it could be simpler but I had to use that structure to
offer different languages)

In the FTP site, templates are in the 'dinksols' directory:
- dinksols/dinksolsarticle.html is walkthrough
- dinksols/article-14.html is the dmods list
- dinksols/article-21.html is the archives
- dinksols/article-17.html is homepage
- dinksols/article-1.html is normal top-level page

Other templates are mostly called by those.

Remaining templates serves other purposes, such as the ones for user
comments.


Once processed, the skeleton/templates become HTML.  The HTML uses
'dinksols/main.css' for style

Last thing you need to know: SPIP's instructions are
french-ish. Namely, 'BOUCLE' means 'loop', 'INCLURE' means 'include'.

The rest should be pretty much straightforward; if not, just ask :)


http://spip.net/ contains decent documentation translated in various
languages, might worth a visit :)