What am I mis-understanding about the override system?

ZenCart 1.3.8
New Install
Following along e-Start Your Webstore with ZenCart

I thought I understood the basics of the Overrides sytem but it doesn't seem to work like I expected. At the VERY basic level, shouldn't I be able to create an override directory with nothing in it except template_info.php, select my override template and have ZenCart display exactly the same as the template_default since I haven't changed anything? (I did this VERY basic test because I couldn't get it to work properly following the example in the book or in the tutorials here.)

Instead of the look of the Default Template, I get:
Pink headers in my left side boxes, Deep purple headers in my right side boxes, Zencart goes from edge to edge of the browser window, an orange header. I'm trying to make small progressive changes to ZenCart but I want it to look like the original as my starting point!

Thanks,
Mike

I think that's not quite enough. Besides that file I believe you need a css folder with a working stylesheet, and maybe the images folder as well. Try adding the stylesheet.css in a css folder and see if you get what you want as a starting point.

Rob

Well I had tried that also but just to be sure, tried it again. Same problem although now it looks a little different. It's missing the bottom panel with "New Products for October". In fact, at one point I tried just copying the entire template_default foler into my templates folder without actually changing anything but the result was the same.

My understanding is that the concept of the override system is that you only add to your template directory what you want to change. If you didn't add anything, nothing would change and it would look identical to the default. Am I misunderstanding something?

Mike

You are seeing the template_default styling, which is not the same as the Classic template that is standardly installed with Zen Cart. Classic is a "custom" template, but not intended to be used as is, rather to serve as a model for how a custom template is built. If you want to start from that for your design, copy all /classic/ folders and their files, not just in /includes/templates/ but also in /includes/languages/ and /includes/modules/. Name the new folders with your custom template name.

Yes, I think the template_default CSS was designed with the fabulous color scheme to give an idea that you could style the elements (like left and right columns) differently if you wanted.

Great color choices though :)

Yep, that was exactly the thinking behind the multi-color layout: to show at a glance which areas were controlled by which CSS, and how much was controllable in the stylesheet (this was when they changed the layout from all tables to nearly all CSS several years ago).