1.1.1 Release

March 26, 2006 by Benedict Eastaugh | 86 comments

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 pagesâ€”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.

Tags: 1.1.1, alternate styles, download, features, headers, tags, tweaks

86 comments

ionfish on April 11, 2006 at 5:31 pm

Presumably you’ve created a new page using the tags template?
Woordenaar on April 11, 2006 at 7:46 pm

@ionfish: yes i did.
ceejayoz on April 11, 2006 at 8:37 pm

Woordenaar, if you haven’t already, try rebuilding your permalink rules at /wp-admin/options-permalink.php.
ceejayoz on April 11, 2006 at 8:41 pm

ALso, what is the page ID for the tags page listed at /wp-admin/edit-pages.php?
Woordenaar on April 11, 2006 at 9:30 pm

I tried rebuilding permalink rules, no succes. The page ID is 122. Pointing to http://boek.woordenaar.nl/?page_id=122 gives the right result, so it seems to be a permalink problem, not a Tarski problem. I can changed the postslug to ?page_id=122 and that works, but WP changes that to page_id=122 which is just a “normal” postslug. So I tried tag as postslug instead of tags and that works, but tagcloud or tag_cloud are creating 404 codes. Strange, but I can live with tag as postslug. Thank you guys for helping me so far.
ionfish on April 11, 2006 at 9:34 pm

Is your .htaccess writable? It’s strange that most of your permalinks work, but the tag one doesn’t.

By the by, we’ll fix the misplaced Archives / 404 headers in the next release; a small oversight from when we added the option to swap the columns.
ceejayoz on April 12, 2006 at 12:18 am

Woordenaar, the different tag slugs working is intriguing. I’m wondering if a plugin you’ve installed has its own uses for those pages and thus has .htaccess rules that are interfering. Very strange…
Woordenaar on April 12, 2006 at 7:26 am

@Ceejayoz: I only have UTW up and running, but looking at the .htaccess rules was not a bad idea. When upgrading to WP 2.0 I encountered some problems with UTW 2.8.9, the forum pointed to a solution by manually adding rewrite rules. That worked and these rules were still active, removing this rules is finaly giving the right result. Thanks again.
Adam on April 13, 2006 at 12:31 am

Just wanted to drop in to thank you for such a beautiful and functional theme! Most of the minimalistic themes I’ve seen are so bland, but now my search is over!
newrui on April 13, 2006 at 11:22 pm

something really cool, maybe you guys could incorporate it into the next release, say for recent articles on the bottom of the page

http://asymptomatic.net/2006/04/13/2311/building-a-shelf-in-wordpress/
ceejayoz on April 14, 2006 at 1:26 am

Well, a shelf is most useful for content that appears above the main page contents. The ‘Recent Articles’ section doesn’t appear above the main content, so it’s not particularly obtrusive.

The Foliage Mod theme has an example of a very nice shelf, and makes for a good comparison vs. Tarski for deciding when and when not to use the technique.
AndrewE on April 14, 2006 at 9:22 am

Thanks for this theme, I love it!

I’m using a slightly modified (as in graphically modified) version of it for my blog.
Sara on April 16, 2006 at 1:10 pm

Widgets are coming in the next release.

That is absolutely awesome to hear. Being able to edit the contents of the sidebar in the content section as well as the bottom bar with the search function would be great. I currently have to resort to editing the source files (which I really don’t want to do), but knowing I can easily change back to my custom setup with the widget plugin would be great.

About the shelf idea: If you decide to include this, please make it as an option. I had a shelf myself, and I actually didn’t like it. I guess I am trying to aim for simpler things these days. I am trying to exclude as much javascript as possible on my website, and I consider the shelf a kinda frivolous thing thats only meant to be for looks and not for practical purposes. Tarski looks wonderful without a shelf, and in my humble opinion it would ruin the aurora around the Tarski theme: beautiful simplicity.

Please keep up the great work! This is one of the best themes I have enjoyed so far and I am currently tweaking it on my local server setup before putting it up live. Wonderful simplicity that works right out of the box. Thank you!
AndrewE on April 16, 2006 at 10:23 pm

Still making minor adjustments to this great theme. There’s a couple of things I’d like to ask your advice on.

1) How could I go about adding a kind of tagline that would sit next to my main title: e.g. “DESPERATE CURIOSITY a blog about blah blah”

2) Right at the bottom in the ‘recent articles’ section I see some people of inserted other things in paralled that sit under the search bar. How is that done? Or is that really tricky?

Thanks so much for your time and effort guys.

AndrewE
AnthonyJ on April 17, 2006 at 11:33 pm

I second the idea for adding the Tagline I have added it on my site but had to hard code it into the Header file because it was the only way to get it to display that I found. Having an option to add a Tagline would be incredible.

Love the theme keep up the excellent work.

Thanks
ceejayoz on April 17, 2006 at 11:41 pm

Righto, we’ll add in the tagline option.

AndrewE, adding things below the search bar and/or the recent articles bit is done via the various theme hooks.
AndrewE on April 20, 2006 at 11:46 am

Thanks ceejayoz, is there any quick fix for the tagline that I can use in the interim?
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aquazero on April 28, 2006 at 11:30 am

Could you guys add ThickBox in your next release….

http://codylindley.com/Javascript/257/thickbox-one-box-to-rule-them-all

It would be super cool….
ceejayoz on April 28, 2006 at 1:55 pm

aquazero, we won’t be adding that in to the next release, but it’d be easy for you to install the plugin linked in the comments…
zeal on April 29, 2006 at 5:46 am

Tarski is a great theme. Thanks.

I have a little problem here. If I enabled wp-cache, the reader’s comments can not show up immediately. I do not have this problem with the wp default theme. Is there a solution for this? I am a DH user, therefore, wp-cache is quite important for me.
ceejayoz on April 29, 2006 at 6:05 am

zeal, you’ll need to contact the WP-Cache plugin author on that one. To my knowledge, it is a completely theme-independent plugin requiring no integration on our end.

I’d check, but his website seems to be down right now.
Brett on May 3, 2006 at 7:32 am

Thank you for Tarski! It’s clean and elegant, always the best kind of theme, IMHO.

I have a suggestion/request for a tweakable option – at the moment you have an option for only showing the sidebar on the front page. I am tempted by this because I do have a long-ish sidebar and so there is a lot of whitespace between the post and the comments, if the post is short. But it looks bare without a sidebar at all, and also reduces navigability. Would it be possible to take how you have the option of which sections to add to the sidebar, and do the same for the non-home page sidebar? Even if I could remove just the blogroll from my non-home page sidebar, it would reduce the whitespace considerably.

Thanks again.
Douten on May 8, 2006 at 2:29 am

Hello there!

I’m having a problem with the theme. Between the image and the title there’s a little space. I want to get rid of it, and have tried many ways but still no success.

Also for my site I wanted to do the header continuing into the body, you can see here http://douten.frozendelusion.net/ So what I did was did part of the picture as a bg for #navigation and the other part for #content but for some reason the bg on #content got cut short.

Thanks!
ionfish on May 9, 2006 at 11:38 pm

Sorry for taking a couple of days to respond, I’ve been a bit busy with the tail-end of my degree. The space might be down to some stray padding, or maybe the title’s line-height property?

Looking at your site, you seem to have fixed the issue with the background image. Lovely mod, by the way. :)
AndrewE on May 13, 2006 at 8:34 am

Hi, I’m using the tag cloud on my Tarski-powered blog and the ‘search tags’ section works fine, but the ‘tag cloud’ part doesn’t work. When I click on a word in the tag cloud I get a 404 error saying ‘Not Found’. Does anyone know what the problem might be?

Thanks alot.
ionfish on May 13, 2006 at 11:49 am

Might be a permalink issue. Is your .htaccess file writeable, and have you updated your permalinks? (Options > Permalinks > Update Permalink Structure in the WP admin panel.)
AndrewE on May 13, 2006 at 12:13 pm

Thanks for the quick response ionfish, my .htaccess file is writable and I updated the permalink structure but the same thing is happening. I’m wondering if it isn’t something to do with the configuration of the ultimate tag plugin?
ionfish on May 13, 2006 at 12:23 pm

If it’s this tag page you’re talking about, you seem to be using the default WordPress URI scheme. Whether you’re using it out of personal preference or because you’re not on an Apache server, I don’t know, but I’d hazard a guess that that’s your issue: the /tag/tagname/ scheme doesn’t play nicely with the URI strings. Either change your permalink structure to one of the other options such as “Date and name based”, or uncheck the “Use url rewriting for local tag urls (/tag/tag instead of index.php?tag=tag)” options on the UTW configuration page.
AndrewE on May 13, 2006 at 12:57 pm

Thanks again. I tried changing the permalink structure but now it seems to have created an internal database error and I can’t switch back to the state before or access the admin interface…mmm this is rather worrying, I hope this doesn’t mean I’ll loose all my content. Any idea how to remedy this?
AndrewE on May 13, 2006 at 2:41 pm

ionfish, apologies for that rather confused string of comments. After some tweaking and help from my host I got the tags working again. Thanks for your help and patience. And if I haven’t already said it, thanks for offering such an awesome WP theme to the community.
ionfish on May 13, 2006 at 5:08 pm

Not a problem, glad you got it sorted. :)
David on May 16, 2006 at 5:11 pm

Just out of curiousity, why is there no previous page / next page links?
ionfish on May 16, 2006 at 6:57 pm

Basically because I couldn’t find a location and format for them that felt natural in the context of the rest of the theme. If I can work the issue out then they’ll find their way into a future release.
David on May 17, 2006 at 6:51 pm

Thanks for the response. The reason I asked is because I started to notice a problem as I add more and more entries to my blog, I realized there was no easy way to page through it all.

I hope you have a chance to add it soon…lol.
zeal on May 17, 2006 at 7:37 pm

I add this feature (previous/next page) myself to the template. Though it does not look good, it works.