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Finally, new version of theme is ready. Some of the new features still need some work, and this should be done for the next and last edition of current Starscape. I will post new article by the end of the week with announcement of Startscape II theme.

This edition features new rendering engine called Nova. This will make significant change in the way blog looks. It’s very customizable and is not as limited as classic was. Control panel is also changed to reflect adding of new rendering engine.

Beside this, some new modules have been added: new posts navigation, comments and trackback displaying. Typography is updated, and all the errors from the previous version are hopefully fixed. Also, a lot of other things are fixed with this version including the probelms with the classic theme in 1024×768 monitor resolutions. User guide is also updated.

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This blog will be updated to new Starscape version in a day or two because I am working on new graphics and I still need some time to finish it. Current version has few background images for a Nova engine, and even more will be included in the next edition Draco that will be ready in the next two weeks.

I hope you like the way the Starscape development is going.

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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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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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.

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.

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.