At the installation, PicsEngine only have one template called "default".
The templates are in the directory templates/.
One template is a folder with the template name. So, you also have the folder templates/default/.
Each template contains a file called template.xml in his folder. This XML file is in templates/default/template.xml.
We are going to create a new template. To do that, we only have to create a new folder in templates/. His name will be mytemplate. In this folder, we create a file template.xml with this content:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<template>
</template>
Here is the hierarchy:
|- templates
|- mytemplate
|- template.xml
In your administration panel, in the Settings / Gallery, you can choose the new template.
As you notice, the content of the template is very small while your gallery run a default template.
The concept is pretty great and easy to understand. Your new template.xml is only used if the informations are in it. If PicsEngine doesn't find anything, it load the default template which is in admin/gallery/template.xml. The folder admin/gallery/ also contains all the images used by PicsEngine. You must NOT edit something in this folder.
If you want to edit something, you look at the file admin/gallery/template.xml, your copy the nodes (content of XML) that are interresting and edit the values.
Your personnalized file template.xml is only the difference between the default template and your template.
It's an simple example to show you how to do a new template.
First, open the file admin/gallery/template.xml which is the original template that we CAN'T change.
The color of the background is in the node : template.background.color and his value is 000000, which means black.
We are going to copy this node and paste in our new template.xml and editing the value to FFFFFF (white) :
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<template>
<background>
<color type="hex">FFFFFF</color>
</background>
</template>
As explained before, when PicsEngine want to get the node template.background.color, it will search into our template templates/mytemplate/template.xml, if it doesn't exists there, it gets the default value from admin/gallery/template.xml.