1.1 Release

March 20, 2006 by Chris Sternal-Johnson | 47 comments

Lots of changes, this time, so we opted to call it version 1.1. As always, a detailed list of changes is available in the changelog.

This release has a number of major changes. If you’re upgrading from an older Tarski install, we recommend deleting the entire contents of the old folder and installing a fresh copy of 1.1.

New Header

Ben did a new header, Coffee Rings, and we’ve added a blank header image for those who prefer a minimal look.

Theme Hooks

One of the biggest problems people seem to run into with Tarski and other themes is the necessity of editing theme files to add content to areas of the theme. This causes upgrades to be a substantial pain in the ass for users, as well as making support more difficult for theme authors.

We’re trying out a solution to this problem with Tarski’s new theme hooks. Using a single file, constants.php, code can be added to the theme without losing it when updating to the next version. Take a look at the documentation for more information.

As an example of this, our Mint stats tracker JavaScript for this site is added via the headerInclude hook.

Alternate Styles

Having seen some of the nifty tweaks to the theme, we figured it was time to make tweaking the CSS easier. The options pane now supports alternate styles, which can be used to tweak and override the default stylesheet. For example, this site is now running the polar.css style.

Tarski now ships with several alternate styles, and you can make your own by just uploading them to wp-content/themes/tarski/styles/. Got a nifty alternate style? Please do share yours with us – we may include it in the next version!

Asides

We’ve added an implementation of Matt’s Asides that draws on K2′s implementation as well. Just select a post category in your theme options and away you go.

Tags: 1.1, alternate styles, Asides, download, headers, release, theme hooks

47 comments

Pingback from Tarski · WordPress 2.0.2 on March 20, 2006 at 2:24 am
Trackback from ceejayoz.com on March 20, 2006 at 2:59 am
Logan Leger on March 20, 2006 at 5:20 am

Loving the theme. There’s a stray bullet in the sidebar, though. Any ideas? And I’m trying to add the related posts plugin call to the bottom of a post but it goes all over the place… what’s going on. Again, another impressive release. Great job…
ceejayoz on March 20, 2006 at 5:42 am

Logan, the Related Posts plugin likely will require the same workaround I’ve detailed for the flickrRSS plugin.

Let me know if you have any problems there.

As for the extra list item in your sidebar, not sure where that’s coming from. I can’t find any orphaned <li>s in the theme at the moment.
Logan Leger on March 20, 2006 at 6:11 am

No I wasn’t putting it in the constant file. I was just putting it in the loop, I just can’t get the conditional statement right that tells it to only show if it’s a single post. Otherwise, (like right now) it displays on the homepage as well as on the single post…

Yeah, I have no idea. That bullet appeared after the upgrade.

Also, I am using the del.icio.us javascript to get my links. Before, it would bullet it the list with the Tarski bullets, now it doesn’t…
ceejayoz on March 20, 2006 at 6:16 am

To make something only show up for a single page, enclose the whole thing between <?php if(is_single()) { ?> and <?php } ?>.

I don’t see where your del.icio.us JavaScript is… did you turn it off?
Logan Leger on March 20, 2006 at 6:21 am

I thought I tried that… it works now, thanks.

The del.icio.us js is at the bottom, in the footer. It’s titled “Linkblog”.

That stray bullet is really bothering me.
ionfish on March 20, 2006 at 1:02 pm

You have an additional, empty li element at the bottom of your sidebar for some reason (with no parent ul). No idea why, I’ll look into it and see if it’s a problem on our end. Just to clarify, unless a list has the class navlist or archivelist applied to it, it will be bulleted and indented.
Logan Leger on March 20, 2006 at 1:22 pm

OK. I guess I’ll have to custom style the javascript. I just really didn’t think I had to because it worked before…

I looked in my sidebar and I cannot see any stray li‘s… don’t know what’s up there…
ionfish on March 20, 2006 at 1:28 pm

View > Source on your front page and check out lines 211 to 213 (might be a bit different if you’re logged in, due to edit lines showing up etc.). It’s most likely a plugin doing something odd.
Logan Leger on March 20, 2006 at 1:54 pm

It’s there only when I logout… hmmm… I wonder which plugin might be causing this…
El Desviado on March 20, 2006 at 8:28 pm

Hi!
First of all, thank you for the theme. I have a problem with my site after the upgrade. Some of the “lines” under titles in the sidebar have gone away, crossing all the page. Dunno if is it named “stray bullet”, as Logan wrote.

What may i do?
ceejayoz on March 20, 2006 at 8:32 pm

I see a bunch of extra code before the start of the theme code. It would appear to be advertising code from your host, and that is most likely why things are acting strangely.
ionfish on March 20, 2006 at 9:01 pm

Your problems are two-fold. Firstly, your content from the ‘CategorÃas’ h3 tag onwards is actually below the closing tag for the sidebar div, so it’s flowing into the rest of the page. That’s why the borders for those headers are going all the way across the page. You need to make sure that content gets inserted before that closing div tag (which appears on line 32 of a clean sidebar.php).

Secondly, you have an extra closing div tag somewhere which is causing the footer content to spread out across the page. The validator report for your front page lists this as Error 102: Line 369 column 5: end tag for element “DIV” which is not open. The additional closing tag seems to appear just below the end of the code you tried to add to the sidebar.
El Desviado on March 20, 2006 at 9:16 pm

Ok. Fixed. Thank you very much for the support, and for the theme. It’s pretty awesome cause its simplicity and “clean appearance”. Keep workin’ on it please. Thanks again.
Pingback from ionfish · Tarski Header Requirements Analysis on March 20, 2006 at 10:25 pm
sixface on March 21, 2006 at 9:09 am

Love the theme.Thanks for the update. The theme hooks’ thing is really interesting. Not to be too inquisitive, Do you have a list of things we can look forward to in the future releases..?
CaBe on March 21, 2006 at 10:46 am

I really like this theme – I’ll be using it for a blog I’m preparing at the moment.

I have a few suggestions, though, that I’m not able to implement myself:

1) Tarski supports the Universal Tag Warrior-plugin, which has a cool Tag Search-template. That specific template, though, doesn’t integrate very well with Tarski, as far as I can see. IMHO it would be nice with a Search link on the frontpage which led to a Search page with two sections: The standard text-search box at the top and the UTW Tag search feature below.

2) By not writing an About text for the footer, nothing will show up there. Great. But I would like to be able to also exclude the Search box and the Recent articles block from the footer (leaving only the Theme-info part).

3) Finally, is it possible to put a short version of the Recent articles in the sidebar (only headers, i.e.)?

Again: This is not meant to be ungrateful, just suggestions for at great theme from a php-illiterate ;-)
El Desviado on March 21, 2006 at 8:47 pm

Hi again!

I’ve found a problem using your recommended plugin, skippy gravatars. In the creator’s site Skippy don’t mention how to install it in tarski, so i ask here thinking you know how.

1) I don’t know where to place this code into my style.css

.gravatar {
float:left;
padding: 3px;
border: 1px solid #000;
background: #fff;
}

.postgrav {
float: left;
padding: 3px;
margin-right: 5px;
margin-left: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000;
background: #fff;
}

2) I don’t know what code must i insert in my comments.php, cause Skippy says in his site that we could use his own comments.php, and i don’t like that idea.

I ask here cause while i was looking for a good answer in the comments for the plugin, I’ve found that Skippy says that he doesn’t know much about php :(

Sorry for the inconveniences, and thanks again.
ceejayoz on March 21, 2006 at 8:57 pm

El Desviado, just activate the plugin. It is already installed in Tarski – you don’t need to add any code into style.css or comments.php.
ceejayoz on March 21, 2006 at 9:00 pm

I just posted a test, but it looks like your webhost’s advertising code is interfering.

This image should be my gravatar, but I see a bunch of code including “BEGIN RSI BANNER” instead. You might want to contact your webhost and see what they can do to fix it.
ionfish on March 21, 2006 at 9:01 pm

CaBe: I’ll look into the tag search stuff. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

sixface: Chris and I work on this template in our spare time, in addition to degrees and demanding jobs, so we don’t want to start making huge promises we may not be able to keep.

That being said, I can be fairly definite about a few future inclusions. To start with, I want to do some more styles and header images, including a number from other artists. There will be the usual tweaks and refinements (I’ve already implemented a couple of CSS tweaks for the next version), and the option to swap the main content column and the sidebar, so they’re on the left and right respectively (this was fairly simple to implement; I may write a brief post about it).

CaBe, you’ll be happy to hear that we’re looking at our customisation options. Currently this is just at the stage of examining other teams’ implementations, such as WordPress widgets. Basically, we want flexibility, but not at the expense of the soul of the theme, so any decisions have to be made with care. I hope you’ll bear with us while we ponder. :)
El Desviado on March 21, 2006 at 9:19 pm

Damn!

Thank you very much for the effort ceejayoz. It seems to be that my free webhost swamp all my archives with advertising.

May be time for thinking about purchasing a payed webhost…

Thanks again!!
ceejayoz on March 21, 2006 at 9:24 pm

Well, if you go looking, I’ve heard good things about DreamHost.com – $8 a month, not too bad. Cheers! :-)
Anthony Jones on March 22, 2006 at 4:37 am

Really love the theme I have been playing around with it on my test server and figured out how to setup a couple of plugins in the constants.php file. Love that idea by the way. What I am trying to do is add another title for my Random Photo. I cannot get it to work All I get is the first title. Also is it possible to add a space under each of these elements so that they are spaced out on the sidebar.

// $sidebarTopInclude will be added to the very top of the sidebar block.
$sidebarTopInclude = Family Guy Quotes
SIDEBARTOPINCLUDE;
ob_start();
quoteMe() ;
print g2_sidebarimageblock();
$sidebarTopInclude = $sidebarTopInclude . ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

Any guidance is appreciated. Thanks
Logan Leger on March 22, 2006 at 4:49 am

El Desviado, iHostFree.com is a great free webhost, I know from personal experience.

Anthony, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say include the break tag, wherever you need a break…

Now, I have a question…
Can you set divs in the hook file? It doesn’t seem to work for me.
I still can’t solve that stray bullet issue.
And, I love this theme… if I can help you guys in any way, let me know…
Logan Leger on March 22, 2006 at 5:33 am

Ok… yes you can set divs in the hook file, I was just being stupid. I fixed my issue with the linkblog by setting a custom div that just set the ul style to “disc”, if anyone was interested…

That stray bullet is killing me… It’s something in the theme file itself, I believe… Any ideas? I’ll investigate more tomorrow to see if I can find the culprit…

And have you ever thought about setting up a support forum?
sixface on March 22, 2006 at 5:35 am

@ionfish,
I really appreciate your and Chris’s efforts. I love your theme and will look forward to your future releases. Thanks for your reply and keep up the good work.
ceejayoz on March 22, 2006 at 12:14 pm
What I am trying to do is add another title for my Random Photo. I cannot get it to work All I get is the first title. Also is it possible to add a space under each of these elements so that they are spaced out on the sidebar.

If you use h3 headers at the top of each sidebar block, it should space them out appropriately. You can always include tags to manually place a line break.

Here’s some sample code that should do what you want:
```
ob_start();

echo "Family Guy Quotes";
quoteMe();

echo "Random Photo";
print g2_sidebarimageblock();

$sidebarTopInclude = $sidebarTopInclude . ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
```
echo is the PHP function to print text to the browser, so we’re basically displaying a h3 header between the two plugins.

Let me know if that makes sense.

@Logan – no support forum for now, I think…
Arkenor on March 22, 2006 at 4:56 pm

I’m very new with WordPress, so I’m sorry in advance for saying anything too obtuse.

Using Tarski out of the box, the subscribe to feed button is linking to http://www.arksark.org/blog/feed/ which comes up as a 404. There’s no /feed/ directory.

I’ve been advised to change that hard link to http://www.arksark.org/blog/?feed=rss2 which does indeed work fine.

Is Tarski assuming I have a particular RSS plugin, or other non-standard set-up, or is my WordPress 2.0.2 install at fault?

Thanks!
Arkenor on March 22, 2006 at 6:14 pm

Erk, OK, I updated my permalink structure, and everything “magically” fixed itself. I hang my head in shame.

Thanks again!
ceejayoz on March 22, 2006 at 6:30 pm

No worries, Arkenor, glad to hear you got it working.
Logan Leger on March 23, 2006 at 5:44 am

I figured out that whole stray bullet issue. The sidebar was the function . Upon furthur examination I noticed that it wasn’t really doing anything and therefore removed it and much to much expectations, fixed the issue.
ceejayoz on March 23, 2006 at 1:46 pm

Which function? Looks like it got eaten by the comment filter…
Logan Leger on March 23, 2006 at 1:48 pm

I was the wp_meta function I believe is what it was called…
ionfish on March 23, 2006 at 1:56 pm

Yeah, that’s a plugin hook; presumably one of your plugins was using it for something.
CaBe on March 23, 2006 at 9:54 pm

Hi!

Thanks for the answer to my suggestions above. I fully agree with your wish for “flexibility, but not at the expense of the soul of the theme”.

Another thing: I have tried to add a page template for my links in Tarski. To some degree successfully, but …

I would like the header (Links) to look like the word ‘Archives’ on the Archives page, and the link categories to look like ‘Monthly archives’ on the Archives page.

Could you reveal how to do that? Thanks.
ionfish on March 23, 2006 at 10:12 pm

Yeah, you just need to use the right elements. The Archives page header is an h1, the Monthly Archives title is an h3 element.

By the way, you’ll need to change the navbar code a little; currently the link to the Links page is a relative one. So when you’re on /archives/ it goes to /archives/links/, not /links/. You just need to add / before the word links in the anchor tag, most likely.
CaBe on March 23, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Thanks.

But as far as I can see on wordpress.org, where I have found the php-code, that gets the links list , it automatically formats the categories as …

I have placed it inside a
copied from the archives page – is that OK?
CaBe on March 23, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Oops – that did not work…

I’ll try again:

But as far as I can see on wordpress.org, where I have found the php-code, that gets the links list < ?php get_links_list(); ?>, it automatically formats the categories as
…

I have placed it inside a
copied from the archives page – is that OK?

was what I tried to say…
ionfish on March 23, 2006 at 10:48 pm
I think your best bet is going to be copying the links-generating code Tarski uses in the sidebar. Stick the following into your links page, in the place of get_links_list();.

< ?php $link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories"); foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) { ?>
< ?php echo $link_cat->cat_name; ?> < ?php get_linksbyname($link_cat->cat_name, ' ', ' ', ' ', false, 'name', false, false, -1, false); ?>
< ?php } ?>
CaBe on March 24, 2006 at 9:43 pm

Thank you – again.

And excuse me for being stupid, but …

My category ‘Blogroll’ is empty, and I can’t delete it. Anyway, it’s still visible on my Links page. How do I avoid the title of empty categories to be listed?

And how do I get the leading between ‘Links’ and the first category title to be the same as on the Archives page between ‘Archives’ and ‘Monthly archives’?

Soon, I’ll concentrate on my content and be quiet ;-)
ceejayoz on March 25, 2006 at 12:49 am

CaBe, my guess is that you can’t delete the default link category. Try renaming it to another category you actually need – on this blog, for example, the Blogroll category got renamed to “The Authors”.

As for page headers, the h1 must be within a div id="intro" block to have proper spacing. I’m guessing you made a custom template for that links page?

i.e.

Links
CaBe on March 25, 2006 at 9:39 am

:-)
ionfish on March 25, 2006 at 1:49 pm

Alternatively, if you’ve stuck it in the div with the id ‘primary’, wrap the h1 like this:
Links
.
Pingback from Tarski · Alternate Styles with Tarski on March 25, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Pingback from Tarski · 1.1.1 Release on March 26, 2006 at 11:14 pm