index.php being overwritten

Greetings,
We love the HotLeafs (version 1.6) template on this temp Joomla! 2.5.20 site: casite-602480.cloudaccess.net/

The problem happens whenever I try to modify the main template index.php file from within the back end of Joomla. As soon as I do that, the front end disappears into a white screen. If I remove the changes to the index.php file, it doesn't fix the problem. If I replace the index.php file with a previous version, or if I make the changes in Dreamweaver and upload them, I'm fine.

I found the latest version of the template on your site, but the documentation says I have to install it simultaneously with a new version of Joomla.

Do I need to update the template and if so, how do I best do that? IF the version of the template is not the problem, do you know what the problem is? The PHP version on the site is 5.3.28.

thanks,
Hope Kiah

Your active template is too old so you could just overwrite. You need to update joomla first so you could put latest template file versions

Thanks, Ivan! I appreciate getting support for an older template.

Three questions:

1. I'm running Joomla 2.5.20 which is the latest 2.5 version. Should I unzip hot_leafs25.zip and ftp upload the folder, overwriting the existing template?
2. I have modified both the template_css.css and the index.php template file. After overwriting the template files can I upload my two modified files from the old template?
3. will I need to recreate all the color settings?

1. Yes
2. You can do that with template_css.css but we had modifications in index.php you can use new index.php and repeat them again
3. No