My apologies for the misleading post. I put the garland new theme, renamed sandbox, in /sites/all/themes, I simply neglected to specify the absolute path in my post. I do understand that core themes are overwritten, thanks anyway. Unfortunately there is much much more to theming than is apparent in the Zen guidelines. Having read the Zen theming guide and others and worked across a number of issues thus created, I opted for a quick" cop out theme" tool that" just worked" that I could simply recreate if messed up. I have studied themes created by other very competent drupal themers and find few if any comply strictly with W3C guidelines but that is a problem caused by other issues that I prefer to not comment on. Also, having worked briefly in RubyOn Rails applications and theming for that scenario I find Drupal/php theming quite ill conceived and overly complex. If one understands the RoR framework scenario and applies that to Drupal instead of just plain CMS, one finds lines along which Drupal could develop which make site development so much easier. But that's all very off topic. Roger

Start by reading the documentation. New themes don't go in the /themes folder. They go in /sites/all/themes folder. If you put them in /themes they go away when you upgrade.

The readme in Zen tells you how to create subthemes - which apply to subthemes of almost any theme.

I would start on the handbook pages about themes.

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Hi all. I gave up on creating theme from Zen and simply made a new theme from a copy of Garland. Just copied Garland theme to my /themes folder, renamed, changed the .info and replaced all instances of garland with my theme name in the template.php and theme-settings.php files. Seems to work, looks neat, changes colours ok.