Here’s a related posts plugin I cooked up that will display a list of (possibly) related posts at the bottom of posts. Requires Ultimate Tag Warrior.
You are currently browsing Chris Sternal-Johnson’s articles.
Looking for a Widget version of Tarski’s “recent comments” block? Here’s one. Be sure to get the Tarski links Widget, too.
I’ve a bit of an open letter to theme designers up on my personal blog, so if there are any of you around, please do take a peek.
According to Google, there are more than 100,000 pages on the web using Tarski. Wow!
This tutorial has been superceded by the Alternate Styles tutorial. Please follow the instructions there, which have been rewritten and improved.
Ben and I keep an eye on Technorati for new Tarski installs, and one thing I’m noticing is that many people seem to be editing their Tarski style.css file to make colour scheme changes and other tweaks.
While this works, with Tarski 1.1 we offer a much nicer way of doing it - alternate styles. Creating an alternate style instead of editing style.css ensures that your changes are preserved when you next upgrade Tarski.
Doing this is really quite simple - just upload your custom CSS file to the wp-content/themes/tarski/styles/ directory. For example, on my personal blog, I’ve uploaded a file called “ceejayoz.css” with a few tweaks.
Once this is done, all you need to do to activate the alternate style is to go to the Tarski Options page and select the name of your CSS file in the “Alternate Styles” option.
What if I wanted to use (for example) the polar.css alternate style that comes with Tarski 1.1, as well as having personal tweaks? This is also easy - just create a custom style, as already discussed, and put the following code at the top:
@import url(polar.css);
Body classes
When you use a custom stylesheet with Tarski, the theme will automatically apply a class to the body element. So, if you load polar.css from the Tarski options page, you’ll get a line of code like this: <body class="polar">.
This allows you to easily override the style rules in style.css, the theme’s main stylesheet. So, for example, if you were using a custom stylesheet called example.css and you wanted to change the colour of the h3 element, you might have a rule like this:
body.example h3 {
color: #bf6060;
}
A good way to change things is to open up one of the included styles, such as classic.css, and examine how it modifies the basic stylesheet. If you want to make more substantial changes, just look in style.css to see what rules control the presentation of the theme.
Tags: alternate styles, CSS, tutorial
If you’re experimenting with Tarski’s new theme hooks, I’ve written up a quickie tutorial on using them to implement plugins - in this case, flickrRSS.
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
WordPress version 2.0.2 is now available and appears to play nice with Tarski version 1.0.1 (and version 1.1).
Please let us know if you run into any problems with Tarski post-upgrade.
Tarski is a WordPress theme. It’s intended to be usable out of the box, by people who just want to get on with writing and don’t have time to learn web development first. Coming with a choice of tasteful header artwork, Tarski has numerous options accessible via a simple, easy-to-use options page.
For the more technically-minded, Tarski provides a flexible basis for any number of alterations, from simple things like changing the header, to more complex structural changes. ionfish is actually running a modified version of Tarski, so as you can see, fairly drastic alterations are far from difficult.
Take a look at the documentation for detailed installation and setup instructions, as well as plugins Tarski plays nice with.
We release this code under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. You are free to download, modify, and distribute this theme as governed by the GPL. Violators will be punished by an angry teddy bear.
We’d like to thank everyone who made this happen, and hope you enjoy the theme. Stay tuned to this channel for further updates… and please do leave us a comment if you wind up using it!