Default theme of what elgg version ;-) 1.7 or 1.8 ?
BTW - you should feel comfortable coding at the low-level
with CSS, PHP, HTML in order to take an existing theme
and play with it's attributes and features quickly..
Answer will come tomorrow b/c now I lay me down to sleep.

Umm, I think the solution is in the elgg documentation.

http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Engine/Views/Creating_a_new_site_theme

Hope that helps :)

☺☼♥ Hanna ♥☼☺

@Hanna While I can see how Elgg documentation would be great for a dev, it is next to completely useless for a noob to this platform.  The section on creating a template for example has a step in it that says "Create start.php", no links, no guide, no explanation.  While that I am sure means somethign to you guys, to people like me that's borders on ignorance.  I do realize that now that I said that it will be quickly pointed out to me that so is not looking for the answer deeper.  I come from Joomla where everythign seemed to be laid out before you all the time.

@DhrupDeScoop 1.8  PhP is not a problem.  I am very conftable with "coding" in CSS and HTML though I have to say calling CSS and HTML "coding" just seems wrong.

Thank you for replies ;)

 Just to re-state : I would like to make an exact copy of the 1.8 default theme and then go ahead and start customizing it.  I do not want to start a new theme frm scratch if I can avoid it.

This is a bare bones theme perfect for what you want to do. Have a peek

http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/project/790388/developer/sbarron/socialplus-theme-for-elgg-18

I'm not 100% sure about 1.8 as I haven't really looked into it. However for 1.7 you can do this by creating a plugin and copying all of the CSS from elgg/views/default/css.php into a new file and saving it as yourplugin/views/default/yourplugin/css.php

then in your start file call the following:

extend_view("css", "yourplugin/css");

Then you have a carbon copy of the default theme that is overriding the default theme. (Warning this doesn't include the contents of each plugin's css file). 

1.8 might be a similar setup, I'm not sure.

If you're a noob to elgg but consider yourself a dev in general, I would recommend looking at the elgg_development_tools plugin, which will create plugin skeletons for you. You can use them as a basis to start developing your own plugins to do what you want. This would get you started with playing around with the css you mentioned.

Just like any other dev (I think) we learn by doing(testing) far more than by reading. :)

@Trajan Thank you very much, that is exactly the type of info that I was looking for to get started !