Understanding Templates and Styles

[Tom Kraus]

I am still a newbie but I am learning fast. Last week I tried for 5 hours to install a skin by sponsored by one of you esteemed designers with no success. Imported the ____theme.xml but could not find the buttons, etc.

Oddly enough I had been dabling in MyBB too and once I figured out how it worked there, I adapted my thinking to VB. Seems the "instructions" indicated in some of the free downloads don't work! I figured out that you have to open the _theme.xml to see what it says so you can locate folders needing to be uploaded in the "right" place. One of them actually said to upload an unzipped folder with a name that did not exist.

So what's my point?

I was concerned that all my dabbling would mess up my board so I decided to "copy" the vb "forums" folder (all the files are located there) to a backup location on my hosted server thinking that I could also just copy them back if I made a mistake. I am wondering if this the right way to think about it. Do the database files also change in such a way that if I copy these files back I also can be messing up the works anyway?

Thanks in advance for your support.