What with all the kerfuffle lately, I felt I should chime in with a word about Vanilla, the open-source forum software that powers our forum. I discovered Vanilla when it was first released, and adding the Tarski forum was a great excuse to start using it for a live project. Since then I’ve been consistently impressed by its elegant design and plethora of extensions, and would highly recommend it to any site needing a small and low-maintenance forum.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2007.
Just a quick note to say that if you’re testing WordPress 2.3, the trunk version of Tarski (1.7-alpha) is pretty stable, and is compatible with WP 2.3′s built-in tagging functions. I’ll be writing more about Tarski 1.7 and WordPress 2.3 over the next couple of weeks.
Despite only releasing the previous version a month or so ago, we decided to call this release Tarski 1.6 since there have been some fairly major changes. You can obsess over the details in the changelog as usual.
Perhaps most importantly, the header selection code in the Tarski Options page has been almost completely rewritten, although it preserves the same functionality as before. Where before it relied on JavaScript being enabled in the user’s browser, it now degrades gracefully—when JavaScript and CSS are disabled, it will still be functional, building up from an HTML skeleton rather than down from a JavaScript implementation. For this you can thank Chris Erwin, author of the Checkbox & Radio Input Replacement script that makes our new header selection code tick, and Richard Fliam who did some sterling work making our implementation compatible with Internet Explorer.
In line with other changes being phased into the WordPress admin panel, we’ve switched our required JavaScript library to jQuery, which now does the show and hide legwork for the sidebar options selection. The comments file has also been rewritten, stripping out some forty lines of code and resulting in a cleaner, leaner and more maintenance-friendly file.
We’ve also fixed several bugs, including both a recently introduced one where the ‘Author’ field in the comments form was being filled by the author link of the last commenter, and a very long-standing one where comments display was screwed up for users of the ‘Recent Articles’ sidebar widget (many thanks to Peter Cawley for providing this and other fixes).
The new update notification system will hopefully pass unnoticed, as a seamless replacement for the old one. Essentially it’s just an Atom feed, which Tarski checks whenever you visit the Dashboard or Tarski Options page (I may look into caching results for the next version). This is more secure, and allows the notification text to be translated—something that wasn’t possible with the old system. Niels Leenheer’s Feedparser does the heavy lifting.
1.5 translations have been frozen and the latest translations can be found in the translations trunk directory as usual. Just as a heads-up, this will probably be our last major release before WordPress 2.3 comes out. Enjoy the rest of your summer, and we’ll see you in September for Tarski 1.7.
Bugs, suggestions and new translations to the forum please.
Tags: 1.6, 1.6.1, bugs, changelog, CRIR, download, features, headers, JavaScript, libraries, localisation, release, security, tweaks, update notification
A beta version of Tarski 1.6 is now available via svn. If you find any bugs, please post them on the forum. One issue we haven’t yet resolved is that the new header selection code doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 6, so help with that would be particularly appreciated.