Standard e-smith install only punt template-begin and template-end for squid.conf templates. Template-begin, as you can see, has a default squid.conf file, which would pretty much set squid to run in it's default mode, except nearly every tag is commented out. If you want to add custimizations to how squid opperates, be carefull about how you build your template fragments so you can get all the information in the final squid.conf file. In particular, I had problems when I tried to tweak the cache_dir tag to change the size of the cache. The default line is:
cache_dir /var/spool/squid 100 16 256
and it needs to read:
cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 100 16 256
where ufs describes the format of the cache. Without this, you can't get squid to run properly.