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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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.

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After few days of fixing bugs, changing some and adding new features, Starscape theme is now stable. Full list of changes can be found on the Changelog. I have also added some new screenshots, and also updated main theme page to include all Starscape features.

If you have any suggestions about this theme, you can leave a comment here, or contact me via the form on the contact page. Theme is released under Creative Commons license. If you feel like it, you can donate.

Also, in the next few days I will start a series of tutorial posts about creating Starscape theme, and announce features for Starscape II.

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My first Wordpress theme is now ready. My goal was to create simple and clean theme but in the same time a theme that can have more then a single layout like most of the Wordpress themes has. I liked the idea of K2 theme, but that is very complicated approach for me.

Starscape theme has build in different styles (version 0.9 has 16 styles for 4 color schemes), adjustable sidebars (2 vertical sidebars and 1 horizontal) and changeable menues.

All 3 sidebars can be on or off, and they have adjustable size, so you can use the control panel for the theme to set this things the way you like.

This web site uses this theme, so you see how it looks like. So, visit the theme page, look at the screenshots and download the time, so you can try it for your self. I hope you like it.