After almost two weeks of work, new version of Starscape is now available with a lot of new features and a lot of changes. This blog is running on new version of theme for the last few dyas, and now is also updated to the latest, code name Orion. All future major updates of Starscape will have constellation code names.

If you were using some of the old versions, update should go without the problem, but the theme will revert to default settings, because a lot of things are different, and old options will not work.

Here is the list of all major changes and new features introduced with Orion:[singlepic=17,200,240,,right]

New Control Panel:

Control panel is fully redesigned, and the options are now grouped in different tabs. Some of the tabs are still empty, but I am working on that for the next versions.

New Header:

Header is fully redesigned, and now can have different background color and image, and also logo image instead of the standard header blog name and subtitle. Menus have adjustable alignement and colors.

Style Control:

New footer controls, updated date button settings and rewritten complete style engine.

Sidebar Search:

Along side with Wordpress powered search, you can use Google as a search engine.

User Guide:

You can download first version of the theme user guide. This is still work in progress, and you can expect new versions soon.

XHTML and CSS 2.1 Valid:

Theme validates both XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.1 W3C validations. If you use some plugins with non valid CSS, validation will also fail. But on it’s own, theme is valid.

Check For Update:

Theme now checks for updates. Check is performed at most once a day.

Browser Compatibnility:

After a lot of work, theme works in all major browsers: Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera 9, IE6, IE7, Safari 3.