December 2006

Most of the work for Tarski 1.2.1 wasn’t done by us at all, but by Gerard Konning, Mikael Jorhult, and Andreas Beer, who have translated Tarski into Dutch, Swedish and German.

As always, you can read through what’s changed on the changelog. Here are a few highlights, apart from the translations mentioned above.

The first of these was requested on the forum, and actually turned out to be easier to implement than I’d first thought. Basically, if the current page is listed in the navbar, it will be highlighted there. So on the About page, the word ‘About’ in the navbar will be highlighted.

We’ve also added yet another theme hook, $frontPageInclude, which displays its contents on the front page, after the first post. It ought to be useful for adding adverts, or a quick intro to your site.

Finally, we’ve added a link to our new Styling Content documentation on the ‘Write Post’ page in the admin panel, to give Tarski users quick and easy access to the image and insert classes we’ve added over the last few versions.

There are also a number of minor tweaks, basically polishing the things we added in 1.2 and fixing a couple of bugs that had crept in, but I won’t list all these as it might get a little tedious.

A note on translations

It was only after we released 1.2 that I realised that we hadn’t put the Tarski Options page into the gettext framework which allows for translations. Thus, the Options page was omitted from the translations included with this release. This is our fault, not that of our translators, and it’s something we hope to remedy in the next release.

By way of explanation, we meant to overhaul the Options page for 1.2, and for a number of reasons it just didn’t happen. Because we were going to change it so drastically there didn’t seem to be any point of spending ages putting all the text into _e functions, and by the time we came to release I’d forgotten that it hadn’t been done. This has been fixed for 1.2.1 and an updated POT file is up on our localisation page.

Thanks again to everyone who’s contributed to Tarski, and I hope you enjoy using Tarski 1.2.1.

As always, post any bugs or suggestions on the forum.

After however months it’s been since our last release, Tarski 1.2 is finally here. Here’s the changelog, which gives details on the various fixes, tweaks and new features.

Since most people won’t want to trudge through the changelog, here’s a brief list of some of the major things we’ve added, many of them after user requests.

There are now links to next and previous entries in individual archive pages, so people can navigate from entry to entry. There’s also pagination support for posts and pages, so you can make multiple-page posts and pages.

Also included is the pagination of index pages (like category and date archives, the front page, and so on). This is completely optional: you can enable or disable it at will from the Tarski Options page.

There’s some under-the-hood stuff, like better trackback and language support (so that people can do translations: more on this later). We’ve also added more theme hooks, and done default styling for a number of additional HTML elements.

Styling & Markup

Two things in this release: firstly, we’ve added insert classes (see the contents listing on the Docs & Help page for an example) to let you add things like updates and menus without having to write your own CSS. I’ll probably write up a brief tutorial some time in the next few days.

Secondly, and more majorly, Tarski’s positioning markup has been substantially rewritten. This will most likely break some people’s custom styles, which is why I hesitated so long over making the changes, but I’m convinced that they will not only make it easier for people to write custom styles but that it will also make working with those styles a much more enjoyable experience.

The new code is more streamlined, more global, and better laid-out. I hope you’ll take advantage of the many improvements in 1.2, break your old styles, and rewrite them under the new system.

Experienced CSS coders will be able to evaluate the changes just by looking at the code, but here’s the executive summary, culled from the roadmap’s notes on this change:

CSS Rewrite Notes

The plan is to replace the numerous, purpose-written classes and ids with a simpler, standardised system. The two basic building-blocks currently being worked on include a content class—for areas like blog entries, text widgets, the ‘about’ text, and so on—and a couple of positioning classes, probably primary and secondary, for the creation of floated columns.

A fairly thorough pruning and re-organisation of the main style.css file will probably be carried out at the same time. New documentation may be added to help people writing alternate styles to easily manipulate our styling system.

Localisation

We were going to wait, so we could include translations in this version, but we decided just to get 1.2 out there and release new versions as and when translations arrive. You can download the from our localisation page.

Please post translation submissions on the forum, it makes it a lot easier for us if support and modification stuff goes through there. Alternatively, if you’re feeling shy, you could email me with your work.

In Closing

Many, many thanks to our beta testers and the various problems they reported. Tarski 1.2 is undoubtedly a more polished release due to their hard work.

That’s all for now, ladies and gentlemen; we hope you enjoy using Tarski 1.2.

As always, post any bugs (and there will be some, despite the devoted efforts of our testers) on the forum.