I spent an hour trying to figure this out, I hope this post ends your search for the same answer. If you’re new to typo (as I was) and are struggling to get Typo contest winning themes to work, try this quick fix (taken from Typo theming guide).
Typo trunk recently broke compatibility with a lot of the Typo Garden themes (according to ticket:817). You will have to replace the following line from layouts/default.rhtml
<%= render_component( :controller => ‘sidebars/sidebar’, :action => ‘display_plugins’) %>
with the line:
<%= render_sidebars %>
to get the themes to work with Typo trunk.
