Do I use the $smarty global variable to display pages?

Uh, no - we use:

$gBitSystem->display( 'tikipackage:articles/list_articles.tpl', tra("articles") );

Where:

'tikipackage:articles/list_articles.tpl' is a url to find package templates store under package/templates/ directory
tra("articles") is used to change the browser title - should be standard practise to do this and indicate where in the CMS you are (and what you're looking at).

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