Just another regular maintanence release is here. Most important change is exapnding CSS classes to support tags for comments like blockquote and code (thanx goes to Anita for pointing this out). Also, some of the IE6 issues have been also fixed. And one very nasty bug in author module (thanx to Snider for discovering this bug).

Since I am still getting a lot of questions about customization of Starscape:

After you install and activate Starscape, in the Design WordPress menu you will get one more option called Starscape. This will open a new control panel page with a lot of options for customization of Starscape and blog. Also, read the user guide located in user_guide folder to find out what all the options are for. There are more then 15 diffrenen modules available that are built in the theme for DIGG, adjustable sidebars, menus, tags, gravatar… Read this user guide before asking any Starscape related questions to avoid repeating things.

Thank you for using Starscape.

I have created new blog as a demo and preview of Starscape theme. This offical blog will always feature latest stable version, and demo blog will feature demo versions and will be free of plugins.

So, the demo URL is:
demo.starscapetheme.com

Demo features WordPress 2.6.0 with preview of the next Starscape release 1.5.0 Scorpius. New version of Starscape will be released in the middle of next week.

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Last few weeks I was working on some new features for Starscape Cygnus edition, and I have started compiling the list of features I would like to transfer to Starscape II and also a list of new features. Some of the current Starscape things is still in the rough phase, and I don’t expect to polish all of them, not until Starscape II is in development. This is especially the case with Nova rendering engine that has much more potential then the current version you can see in Cygnus edition.

I will start working on Starscape II in august, and I expect to see first public version in september. There will be a test blog available during development period, and I will upload new version of theme at least once a week.

So, if you are interested to read more on Startscape II features, then read on.
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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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