that post is telling you how to create a child them…  have you actually gone through the steps of creating the child theme?

if so, please explain what you did… and post the contents of your child theme spTheme.txt file…

from reading it it seems to be about this

1) create new directory  in the default directory, called child

2) copy/download a entire new sp theme (no where to download this from) into it and then edit the templates i want to change.

so the question remains how to get a theme to download and edit before uploading and activating it ?

Not quite – The easiest way to make a child theme of ‘default’ is to copy the entire default folder and modify it. The basic workflow would be:

1. Navigate to wp-content > sp-resources > forum-themes >
2. Copy the default folder and paste the copy into the forum-themes folder
3. Rename to whatever you’d like i.e ‘yourtheme’
4. Update the stylesheet name to ‘yourtheme’ – i.e forum-themes > yourtheme > styles > yourtheme.php
5. update the required fields in spTheme.txt (name, child of default, stylesheet name etc)
6. Remove what you don’t want to change such as templates, images, anything else.

You can remove every CSS rule from the stylesheet and just add your changes. If you already have a changed default theme and you have a decent editor, you should re-download the theme keeping a copy of your modified one, and compare the changes. This way you can pull all your changes out and paste them into your child theme’s yourtheme.php stylesheet.

Hope this helps!