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After some two weeks of work, here is new major revision of Starscape theme, code named Hydra. This revision contains a lot of behind the scenes changes that will allow new important design features I am working on for the next Cygnus revision. More on the Cygnus preview will be available in the next 5 or 6 days.

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.
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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.
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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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