After few months I have finally managed to update Starscape theme. There were few bugs reported in this period, and they are fixed in this version. But the main reason for this update are the new integration features that are available in GD Star Rating plugin. Options panel is updated and new, separate tab for GD Star Rating is added.

This new tab will be visible only if the GD Star Rating is installed. You can use it to integrate comment review and/or standard and/or multi ratings. You can add all 3 blocks if you want. I have fixed few CSS problems, few rendering bugs and made few more changes.

As for the further updates, I can’t promise anything, but at least I will update as needed for GD Star Rating, so you can use it as an example of the integration features.

Small update to fix a potential problem with FavIcon noticed by the people at WordPress.org testing themes for theme directory.

I have added new option allowing display of Add Comment button along site comment counter with posts on front page, search results page, authors and archives pages.

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.

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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