The template doesn't show any styling. CSS files are not loading.

There is a bug in PHP version 5.3.0 which produces an error when the CSS files are in a subdirectory (or rather, because the style.ini file contains the / character).

The best option is to upgrade PHP.

An alternative is copying all CSS files into the template's root folder and change all css/<filename>.css to <filename>.css in the style.ini.

Or: PHP configuration has changed, PHP not yet properly set on new server
Answer: make sure parse_ini_file() is allowed. Check if your configuration is containing
disable_functions = …,parse_ini_file,… ← remove from disable_functions

In the release 2014-05-05 “Ponder Stibbons”, when the layout seems broken, but you have installed the latest recent version of your template, then you may be affected by an issue in the CSS compressor. Please try disabling the 'compress' config setting. (In the next release this will be fixed, so you would enable the compression then again.)

If it looks like there is plain HTML without any styles applied, there may be an error in one of your stylesheet files. Unfortunately there are many of them. To find the offending one, try this:

1. Disable compression of CSS in Dokuwiki configuration (see above)
2. Cleanup the cache by deleteing all content inside data/cache directory.
3. Clear the browsers cache
4. View CSS seperately by calling http://yourdomain/lib/exe/css.php?purge=true. This shows all CSS send to your browser. '?purge=true' ensures that the data you see is not sent from a cache-file, but build at runtime. It is the concatenated data of all styles loaded from plugins and template. Now inspect the CSS if it looks strange somewhere.
5. Disable plugins, one by one and reload CSS in step above and/or Dokuwiki page. On success you have found the component causing the error. Take a closer look inside the plugin and inspect/validate the CSS files for errors or unresolved placeholders. One may use helper tools like The W3C Markup Validation Service to copy/paste CSS from output above or from CSS-files in your plugin.