Why is it that themes come compressed as a .zip, when they need to be .tar.gz/.tar ?. Surely having the files as.tar to begin with would make more sence.

Also non of the themes that i've downloaded from your own site even work via the template uploader!. Can anyone explain this?

I can. You did totally miss the point. You got themes and templates mixed up. Templates have nothing to do with the themes at this point. If you want to change your website design using different themes you need to upload those unzipped files via ftp into your /themes directory on your webserver. Instead if you want to change your module layout you need to edit templates.

Here's a link that, although somewhat out of date, is still pretty accurate. I think deka87 is right, there's a missunderstanding on the difference between themes and templates.

https://xoops.org/misc/docs/Xoops-for-Dummies/ - about half way down the page.

You can think of a theme as a 'skin' or 'wrapper' around the templates. Templates control various aspects of the way information is displayed.

Themes change the way your Xoops site looks. They are usually provided in a compressed format (typically .zip). You just decompress this file and then copy the theme folder into the Xoops 'themes' folder. The new theme should then be selectable in 'Preferences Main/General Settings'.

Templates are 'Smarty' .html templates used to present data from modules. Each module installs a set of templates for each of it's pages and blocks. If you want to edit these templates online in the Xoops Templates Set Manager, you need to clone the default template set and edit the cloned files.

If you move site, you can download the cloned template set (Xoops automatically saves it as a tar.gz file) and then upload it to the new site.