A couple of things.
#1 I did a considerable amount of work re-working the theming system to make it faster and easier to upgrade themes by removing a LOT of redundant code.
#2 I wrote the majority of the current theme upgrade documentation, but I am not a documentation writer. I would very much like to know what areas weren't clear enough so that I could address them. Perhaps after gaining an understanding you could offer some suggestions which would put me on the right path.
#3 I looked at your posted
http://shadygallery.com/themecode.txt and I immediately noticed that your using $template_main_menu1 and $template_main_menu2 which I KNOW the documentation covers the fact that those aren't used anymore.
#4 You said you had included "{SYS_MENU}{SUB_MENU}{ADMIN_MENU} " and Dennis already mentioned that they were AFTER {GALLERY} so they would be handled by pagefooter which is true. Thats not where 1.3 coppermine would look for replacing the menus either. EVEN if you move those tokens above {GALLERY} your code will STILL have a problem because you included the old pageheader function in your theme.php which doesn't look to replace those tokens.
#5 I also noticed your insistence on moving over templates from the old theme, that don't need to be there. Most themes only edit MAYBE 5% of the themeable functions, which means you have to go upgrade a lot of the same code for absolutely no reason. If the look of your theme for that template or function doesn't do anything different than the classic theme then you can just omit it. Thats why the theme upgrade process has you do several checks before you blindly go copying things from your old theme. Everything you move from your old theme has to be upgraded to be functional with 1.4. The only way you know what needs to be upgraded is to compare your functions with the functions in sample's theme.php. It's a pain, and 95% of the time totally unnecessary.
For example:
Water-Drops theme.php from 1.3
See Attachment: There were too many lines of code to post in a single message.
here's water drop from 1.4
<?php
/*************************
Coppermine Photo Gallery
************************
Copyright (c) 2003-2005 Coppermine Dev Team
v1.1 originaly written by Gregory DEMAR
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
********************************************
Coppermine version: 1.4.3
$Source: /cvsroot/coppermine/stable/themes/water_drop/theme.php,v $
$Revision: 1.14 $
$Author: gaugau $
$Date: 2005/11/28 07:43:00 $
**********************************************/
define('THEME_IS_XHTML10_TRANSITIONAL',1); // Remove this if you edit this template until
// you have validated it. See docs/theme.htm.
// HTML template for template sys_menu spacer
$template_sys_menu_spacer ='<img src="themes/water_drop/images/orange_carret.gif" width="8" height="8" border="0" alt="" />';
?>
Would you prefer just to omit functions, or would you like to have to upgrade that entire 1.3 theme for XHTML compatability as well as all the changes for 1.4?
Which theme.php would you prefer to upgrade to 1.5?
It really is particularly funny to me, that the reason I pushed to overhaul the themeing system is because I didn't want to write the theme upgrade documentation for identifying every bloody XHTML change that occured in the core code and separating that from real functional changes. I upgraded several themes that way, and I can personally guarantee that the new method is better. If you don't like the current theme documentation, you REALLY wouldn't have liked what the documentation would have looked like if we and done the same kind of docs that had been done for 1.2 -> 1.3 upgrades.