2
Themes and templates are quite different !
A theme is the appearance of your site : colors, fonts, size, images, etc...
Templates are responsable for the layout. The Template Set Manager (System Module -> Templates) allows you to add, delete, edit and duplicate the HTML templates that control block and module layout.
You said you uploaded a template, are you sure it was a template and not a theme? Themes often come in zip files althought templates often come in .gz or .tar files.
To set the default template, go to
System Admin>Preferences>General Settings>Edit
You set the default template there, under Default Template Set
However, what you want to achieve I guess, is changing the theme. For that, you need to unzip the theme zip file and upload the folder of the theme to the 'themes' folder of your XOOPS site. Make sure that the folder you upload actually contains the theme files and not another folder in which the theme files are.
To be sure, once uploaded, you should find something like this :
XOOPS_ROOT/themes/YourNewTheme/some files... (one would be theme.html)
After you've done this, you get back to
System Admin>Preferences>General Settings>Edit
and under Default theme you select YourNewTheme
That's it !