Is there a way to set the listings of albums so that are ordered by name alphabetically via the theme itself, and not have to edit the listing yourself via admin??

I suppose you could override the sort value for the current album before displaying it, yes. Take a look at classes.php (the Album class mainly) and the album.php in the theme, come back if you can't figure it out.

its the listings of albums on the index.php page I want to order by name.....

I took a look at the classes.php file and I think I saw the section which concerns the album listings on the index file, just not sure how to alter the actual index file to do this as my php knowledge is zero??!

Has anyone figured this out? I have no experience with php also.