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.

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.

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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After almost two weeks of work, new version of Starscape is now available with a lot of new features and a lot of changes. This blog is running on new version of theme for the last few dyas, and now is also updated to the latest, code name Orion. All future major updates of Starscape will have constellation code names.

If you were using some of the old versions, update should go without the problem, but the theme will revert to default settings, because a lot of things are different, and old options will not work.

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I am currently working on the support forum for my theme(s) and plugins. I hope the forum will be ready in the next few days.

As for the changes to the Starscape, here is the list of the features I am currently working on:

1. Blog title links to the blog home
2. ScanDir() function replaced with custom function for PHP4 compatibility
3. Update notification after changing Starscape settings
4. User Guide

All suggestions about the new features for the theme you can sned using the contact form on this site (page About), or on a forum once it goes live.