UPDATE
As @ProxiBlue pointed my mistake, you need to put this in your theme/etc/theme.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<theme>
<parent>rwd/default</parent>
</theme>
and have empty in default
section, unless you have default
theme in your theme package.
Things to understand of fallback of magento theme
You should have RWD in "Default" section of system > configuration > design > theme
. This will make sure your theme will fallback to this theme.
Points to remember
- When there is no required
.phtml
file exist in RWD theme, then it will again fall back to base theme.
- Not all
.phtml
files exist in RWD theme, some of them extend from base
theme.
- Same thing for
css or js or image
files.
Hope this helps you.
More reading:
- http://alanstorm.com/magento_infinite_fallback_theme_xml
- http://www.classyllama.com/blog/depth-look-magento-theme-fallback
Why there is no style applied?
When it is falling back to base it tries to find those styles, since they don't exist there, it is unable to style your html. It totally make sense. Right click on browser and do inspect element, you will see those css/js/image files thrown as 404 not found error.
system > configuration > design > theme
section?