March 2006

It’s definately evolution rather than revolution with this release. After we launched 1.1 I started tweaking, playing around with various niggles that were bothering me about the theme. You can go through all the details in the changelog.

New Features

Martin kindly did another header for this release, Thought Wind.

We’ve added another variant style, skyline.css. It’s very much in the same vein as the other styles, but for the official styles and headers I want to create a sense of variations on a theme, rather than radically different looks (you can always make your own if you want to do something completely different, after all).

There’s now also an option to swap the columns, with the sidebar appearing on the right and the content on the left. All the other columnated sections—navigation, comments, the footer—swap over as well if you choose this option. You can find it under ‘Miscellaneous Options’ at the bottom of the Tarski Options page (Presentation > Tarski Options in the WP admin panel, as always).

Chris has also done some excellent work revising the navigation bar. It now gets its links from the list of top-level pages—and you can choose which ones you want to appear. This option too appears on the Tarski Options page. Another advantage of doing it like this is that the links are no longer hardcoded; if you don’t have URL rewriting enabled, or have a different set of page slugs to ours, the links will still find your pages.

This change to the navigation bar does require you to select your desired pages in the Tarski Options page—don’t panic if there’s suddenly only a “Home” link after updating!

Tweaks

None of the tweaks will change anything major about Tarski—they just add a level of polish which was previously missing. Feed links now find your correct feed addresses, rather than just linking to /feed/; titles that are longer than one line of text will space themselves properly; various bits of “under the hood” code have been cleaned up or streamlined.

Just one note: the page.php file is now redundant, so make sure you delete it when you upgrade Tarski.

If you use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, you’ll be glad to hear that Tarski now includes complete support for its features: we’ve added the option to activate the live tag search feature on the tags page. The plugin does a pretty terrible job of separating content and presentation from behaviour, so the way it operates and displays isn’t as elegant as I’d like. C’est la vie.

As always, post any bugs or problems you have in the comments. We really appreciate your response; it makes the job worthwhile.