Hi Scott, I'm also relatively new in drupal, so I don't see exactly what's going wrong in your special case, but I might have some hints that hopefully get you further:

* as far as I understood, the garland theme is not especially made to be extended and customized. The Zen theme is made for exactly this, maybe the "basic" theme, also. You might have moire luck working with these?! * This mailing list is not very crowded - it seems you have much better chances to be read and replied to when using drupal.org's website for questions and problem reports. * if you go there and ask for help, you should post the exact error message you are getting, and the code part where you define garland as the base them, you might have a typo somewhere - if inheriting of template.php doesn't work, the whole parent thing seems not to work at all.

Henning

Scott wrote:

I'm working with a copy of Garland on Drupal 6.9. Essentially I copied Garland into ./sites/all/themes/custom/kidsgardens to create my custom theme. I created a working site. I would now like to remove the template.php and style.css files (at least those parts that belong to Garland) from this directory and eventually have only my customizations there. I named Garland as the base theme in kidsgardens.info and renamed template.php and style.css (to hide them) expecting them to be inherited from Garland. No joy. The php stops at the call for phptemplate_get_ie_styles(), the first function call in page.tpl.php. When I return template.php to my theme directory, the code works but my css is still gone - until style.css is returned to the directory.

Being new to drupal I suspect I'm missing something fundamental.

If you have a css file named the same as the parent's, then the parent theme's css file won't be used.

If you have not specified *any* css files in the parent theme, then you'll be assumed to have a 'style.css' (even if you don't).

Without seeing your .info file and such, that's most likely waht's wrong.