With the lastest version of [KnowledgeBuilder][1] came a huge change in how much flexibility the system gives you to tailor KB to your site’s look and feel. It used to be that the “public” section of KB was a collection of half HTML half PHP pages that were difficult to understand and edit. About the only thing you could do easily was specify a header and footer and change some colors via the master CSS file. Knowledge Builder 2.5x now uses the Smarty Template Engine to allow you to completely customize how your KB site looks and how the information is presented.
[1]: http://www.activecampaign.com/kb “KnowledgeBuilder”

## Smarty Template Background ##
The Smarty Template Engine ([Smarty][2]) is more of a “presentation framework”, allowing PHP programmers to separate their application’s business logic from the visual display. Smarty accomplishes this by using a light markup language that can be embedded in your HTML to display dynamic data that is generated by the business logic side of your application.

## How we use it ##
A lot of work went into completely separating the logic that manages Categories and Articles in KB from the actual presentation of Categories and Articles. This basically splits KB into two parts: one part that evaluates the current context (viewing an article, viewing a category, making a comment, subscribing to an article, etc) and fetches the correct data for that context, and one part that displays that raw information. The second part is what is now completely customizable by you.

When any given page loads in the public section of [KnowledgeBuilder][1] (non-admin section that is), the last step in the process is to render the template for that page. Templates for KB live in the `templates` directory, in subdirectories for each *template set*. KB is shipped with three templates: *Default*, *Directory*, and *Simple*. If you are upgrading KB please note that the old KB template directories will not be deleted, but you can tell which ones are the old ones because their directory names start with lowercase letters (if you no longer need these, it’s safe to delete them).

> *Choosing a template:*
> You can choose which template set you want to use in the Admin section under Settings.

*Continue to the next page to learn about how KB’s templating system is structured…*

[1]: http://www.activecampaign.com/kb “KnowledgeBuilder”
[2]: http://smarty.php.net “Smarty”

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