Installing themes: The procedure for 'installing' a theme for Ode is always the same.

Any category (directories and subdirectories under the document root) may contain a 'themes' directory (which is literally a directory titled 'themes'). If you don't have a themes directory in some category where you would like to put a theme, just create it.

With the 'themes' directory in place, just drag and drop the folder containing the theme you want to install to the themes directory and you're done.

Navigate to the category containing the 'themes' directory where you just installed the new theme (or any subcategory) and make a request that references the theme name.

If the theme you just installed is set as the default in your config file ($default_theme), the theme will be used for every request that does not specifically reference another one.

For example, if I install the text_page theme and set 'text_page' as the value for $default_theme in the config file, then text_page will be used for every request. For example, the following two requests are equivalent, if text_page is the default theme:

http://sample.net/cgi-bin/ode.cgi/ \ 
programming/perl/learning_perl/some_post

http://sample.net/cgi-bin/ode.cgi/ \
programming/perl/learning_perl/some_post.text_page

Of course I can specifically request another theme at any time, for example

http://sample.net/cgi-bin/ode.cgi/ \ 
programming/perl/learning_perl/some_post.html

http://sample.net/cgi-bin/ode.cgi/programming/perl/ \ 
learning_perl/some_post.any_other_theme_name

After dropping the new theme into some 'themes' directory, it's installed. The script will immediately start using the theme when appropriate. Be aware that you should probably check the paths to resources referenced by the theme (e.g. linked stylesheets, images, etc.)

If, after installing a theme the site as displayed in a browser looks 'broken' in some way, you're almost certainly dealing with a path issue.

Check the path to the stylesheet which you'll find at the top of the page theme file. If the theme looks 'almost right' but is missing images, then check all of the img tags in the page file.

Right now all of these paths must be set manually which means it's almost certain that you'll need to modify the theme so that the references to resources associated with the theme point to the correct locations for your installation. This is entirely unnecessary. The script can take care of this. It's an oversight on my part that this isn't how it works already. I'm planning on making the necessary changes soon. And in the future, you should not need to make any changes to help a theme find its associated files.