New version of Starscape is available. And again, long changelog. This is most likelty the most important edition of Starscape so far. Mainly becasue I have planned for this to be last edition of Starscape theme, but I have decided to add some more things. So, the next edition will be called Scorpius, and it will be available in the next two or three weeks. Before that, you can expect one or two minor revisions of Draco.

I have also started working on Starscape 2, with first preview version hopefully ready for the end of september.

As for the Draco, there are a lot of new things here. If you want to know more, please continue reading this post.
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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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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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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.