I don't know about BrandFriendly. But themes are able to use either smarty templates (maybe what's used by this theme) or themes made by php. The ones included in vanilla2 (applications/dashboard/views, mainly default.master.php) are in php, none are pure html.
AFAIK, none are straight html. The closest thing is the smart templates (.tpl) but the logic is just deported, to a plugin dir in smarty. As most views are spread accross the applications, there is no central place for all the views.
Well that sucks. I was considering converting my forums to Vanilla, but I was looking for something more open source, not "You can edit the css... AND THAT'S ALL"...
It depends which parts, as the panel are different modules, the listing of the discussion is a view in vanilla, after that each discussion too. But those are html with php for the logic. So no pure (x)html. => applications/vanilla/views/discussions/
There's nothing like that on the opensource vanilla.
The file you show on the screenshot is a smarty templates, it does the basic layout, but not the particulars shown as smarty functions such as {inbox_link} etc...
Some themes are using the smarty templates such as the one you see, but with that you won't be able to change the way discussions are displayed.
As for the views, they are some "echo html" in the php, and the functions called return mostly html part.
Comments
But themes are able to use either smarty templates (maybe what's used by this theme) or themes made by php.
The ones included in vanilla2 (applications/dashboard/views, mainly default.master.php) are in php, none are pure html.
I've seen documentation showing straight html with variables and IF statements, so if anyone could point me to that, that would be perfect.
As most views are spread accross the applications, there is no central place for all the views.
Smarty is there so that people not knowing php could change more of the theme too.
If I wanted to edit the way the main "all discussions" page looked with xhtml, not css, where would I look to edit?
=> applications/vanilla/views/discussions/
Any clue on where I can find somehting like shown in this image?
http://vanillaforums.org/applications/vforg/views/features/images/themes_feature.png
It looks like something that would be accessible straight from the Admin Panel.
The file you show on the screenshot is a smarty templates, it does the basic layout, but not the particulars shown as smarty functions such as {inbox_link} etc...
Some themes are using the smarty templates such as the one you see, but with that you won't be able to change the way discussions are displayed.
As for the views, they are some "echo html" in the php, and the functions called return mostly html part.