From: "Roger" <arelem@bigpond.com>
To: support@drupal.org
Sent: Wednesday, October 9, 2013 3:46:49 PM
Subject: [support] Trivial sub-theme: Renaming Bartik

>> You also have to change all occurrences of Bartik in the files to
>> your new name.
> I don't think there are any such occurrences. Which "files" do you mean?
>

go to drupal core themes/bartik/templates. Not /sites/all/themes.
Copy the page.tpl.php and node.tpl.php to your
/bartic-copy/sites/all/themes/
Copy the /themes/bartik/template.php to your /bartic-copy/sites/all/themes/

Then open template.php in your subtheme folder and change every instance
of bartik_preprocess to your subthemename_preprocess.

page.tpl.php is where drupal calls the theme bits and piecs from to
fashion your page. You can manipulate this as you want but I suggest you
don't.

You can copy the /bartik/css folder over to your subtheme
/sites/all/themes/yoursubtheme/ so you can override core theming using
the correct terminology.

Now the trap you will run into is:
When you update Drupal core, it updates the core bartik theme which
calls on a lot of core includes and this can break your bartiksubtheme.
Been there, done that.

Hope this helps

This is certainly the clearest explanation of how to create a sub-theme, but it confuses me. I'm lead to believe that it is not necessary to reproduce all of the contents of the base theme in the directory of the sub-theme; the point is to inherit all of this so you also inherit updates. If I read this correctly (https://drupal.org/node/225125) I don't need to provide anything but at least one new stylesheet; everything is inherited from the base theme.

Thanks for the help,

Chris.