Switching themes in Drupal without the web interface

Question

I'm in the process of learning php and creating themes.

Unfortunately, while I was editing a theme that i was currently using in drupal, I made a mistake in the theme such that nothing shows up anymore, even if i were to hit drupal/index.php. I want to change my broken drupal theme to a working one but i'm unable to do so because I can't even view the administration section.

Answer 1

The How To reset your theme via the database page on Drupal.org has instructions for changing your theme directly from the SQL prompt.

It's not immediately clear whether this will work in the most recent version of Drupal, so back up your database before attempting this.

Answer 2

The easiest way to change your frontend theme is to set it in your sites/default/settings.php:

$conf['theme_default'] = 'minelli';