Templates are very important in how they generate the site. If you look at template settings, you'll notice that some of the templates have several variables listed. These are generated by the script and fill in their spot. It may seem a little weird until you see them in action in the included supasite.xml template.
The main template is the HTML Template, the one that contains the layout for the site. Most of the variables are probably self explanatory, except for the %css% and %content% ones. The %css% simply takes the data from the CSS Template and places it there. The %content% variable, however, is vital to the operation of Supasite. Depending on what options are passed to the script, a function is run to fill in the data for %content%. For example, on the regular news page ([web_path]/index.php by default), it runs a function to grab the most recent 15 posts to display. Or, the view page ([web_path]/view.php by default) will read the contents of a text file to fill the %content% variable.
As explained just above, this template modifies the CSS code in the %css% variable in the HTML Template. You can use an external stylesheet with either a <LINK...> tag or an @import line, but that must all be set in the HTML Template. If an external stylesheet is used, this template is then rendered useless.
Although most of the CSS classes you set are ones you use in the HTML template, there are some classes used internally by Supasite. Unless you want them to inherit properties, it is recommended that you set these classes to enhance the look of your site.
The script does use some tables and forms, so these settings are recommended as well.
This sets how the date looks in the news. The only significant variable is the %date% one. It takes the date code from the database and converts it using the Date String from the site settings.
This is another important template, dictating how each individual post will look. This template probably has the most variables to it, but they all have a simple description in the Template Settings page. One variable to note is %view_url%. By static URL, it's the URL that will display just this post, and any comments contained underneath. From here, a user can add comments if they wish.
This is very similar in principle to the News Template.
A list of archived months are displayed at the bottom of the news page ([web_path]/index.php). At the moment, only monthly archives are available. %current_year_months% and %last_year_months% will show a space delimited (horizontal) list of all the months that have posts in them, while %current_year% and %last_year% just prints those years out.
These two templates show how the previous/next news arrows will look. They don't matter at all if news arrows are disabled in the site settings.