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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:
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. Well, the work on new Starscape engine takes more time then anticipated. I was ill for a few days, unable to work, but now things are getting together. Nova engine turns to be more complicated to create, but much simpler then default classic Starscape engine. As you can see, there are no boundaries left or right, and the layout can be with fixed width or fluid. Even more width of every element (header, main menu, center, footer) can be adjusted separately. Each element can have independent background color or background picture. There are much more Nova features in the works, so be patient, I think it will be worth waiting. Also, there are a lot of other overall changes and new features, and most important fixes. Official release date for Starscape 1.3.0 Cygnus is 4.july 2008.
As for the changes, detailed list is available on the theme page, so check it out. And if you continue to read this article, I will point to some of the highlights of Hydra. This is new Orion build on the road to Hydra. There are some important updates included in this release, and I am recommending to update older versions to this one.
Also, few more problems with IE6 are now fixed: rendering of the header background and logo in the header, small menu problems. Theme is compatible in IE6 and IE7, and almost with IE5.5 (small problems), but not with IE8 Beta 1. There are some small changes to control panel as an introduction to more changes in Hydra, and completely new CSS files with separate typography and cleaned styles. Typography is still incomplete, I am working on it. 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. 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:
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Posted on 12:23, June 25th, 2008 by 
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The most important new feature for this version is new Print layout. Now all posts and pages have command Print bellow the post (picture on the right). This will display only post or page withound any background, header or sidebars. Only footer copyright notice remains.
