Some people noticed few problems that are as far as I can tell only Firefox3 related. Problem was caused by setting theme to fluid mode. There is an bug in PHP that generates CSS, and Firefox3 refuses to use CSS file that is not completly valid. Now, this bug and few other is fixed.

Also, I went a little ahead of roadmap, and added Related posts module. This will be last Draco update. Next release will Scorpius. If no bugs are reported, next release will be available by the end of august or begining of september.

Another small update. This one is focused on fixing the problem with WordPress 2.6 in case the wp-content folder is not in regular place in wordpress installation folder. The only solution I have found so far instead of loading wordpress wp-config is to sent all settings needed by external file through query string in url. It could be a long string, but that’s the only solution right now.

If anybody has better way of sending settings in external CSS or JS files, please send me a message about it, or leava comment. Also, if you notice some problems with Starscape and Wordpress 2.6, leave a comment here or in the forum: Starscape Support Forum.

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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