All over the internet you can find tutorials, help, samples on creating wordpress theme. Still, there are some topics that are not covered by many of them. I will try to focus on the solution of practical problems I had while creating Starscape theme.

This first part will cover following problems and solutions:

1. Using theme WordPress options within CSS or JavaScript file
2. Adding Gravatar support to the theme
3. Separating trackback from comments
4. Creating Post Date button

And as always, Starscape theme contains all this, so you can check it out also.
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Like it or not, MS Internet Explorer is still the most used browser in the world. The reason for this is MS Windows XP/Vista. IE is bundled with every copy of Windows. Now we have two major IE version:

1. Internet Explorer 6 [IE6]
2. Internet Explorer 7 [IE7]

I will show you what optimizations I needed to add to Starscape to make the theme more compliant with IE6/IE7. Maybe you can use some of this optimizations in developing your own themes.

As for the standard compliance, IE7 is much better, and it’s much easier to make optimizations so theme will work in IE7 as it should. One of the most important improvement for design point of view is full PNG transparency support.
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Not many WordPress themes have additional settings page where blog admins can adjust some of the themes settings. One of the reasons for this is hard to find examples describing in details what you need to do, although documentation has some basic info about that. Also, most themes don’t need such settings page, or is too hard to implement theme design that could be flexible to change like this.
[singlepic=27,210,200,,right]

Most themes can be customized by editing php and css files, but this can be a problem for most users, who use blog as tool, and don’t know much about web design. For them it would be much more convenient to have simple page in their admin panel and selection of options to tweak.

This article will show you step by step how to create options page for your theme, how to save settings and how to use them in your theme. Mine Starscape theme will be used as a reference in some points, so you might also want to download it and check for yourself what can you do with settings page.

Just to be clear, I am not going to create nothing fancy here, I will keep the code simple, so you can see what’s going on. If you want more details you can always take a look at Starscape theme code.

Requirements:

For this to work, you need to know:

1. How to create regular WordPress theme
2. How to work with PHP classes

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I have spent few days adding new features to Starscape, and I managed to make theme work in Safari, Opera, Firefox and IE7. But now I am trying to sort things out with IE6 and a lot of things are still the problem. This blog now runs on latest internal beta version of Starscape 1.10. As you can see there are a lot of new features, soon to be available for public use.

There are two main problems with IE6: PNG and Box Model.

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Last few days I was working on fixing a lot of HTML and CSS used by the theme, and I have managed to make the theme completly XHTML 1.0 Transitional valid and also CSS level 2.1 valid. Latest public version of Starscape (1.0.2) is not valid, there are few bugs in there, but the modified code for this blog is. Next version 1.1.0 is 100% valid. But this is not always enough.

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