Tarski’s designer and code-mangler-in-chief, Ben also writes over at Extralogical.
I’ve just finished uploading all the old versions of Tarski—47 of them!—to GitHub, so if you ever need an old version, you can get it from the Tarski release archive.
The only one that seems to be missing is 1.0, so if anyone happens to have a copy kicking around, do let me know.
If you want to make a child theme for Tarski, perhaps taking advantage of the new functionality added in Tarski 2.6, I’ve put together a few lines of code that you can start with.
The important thing that this code does is use the main Tarski stylesheet as well as the child theme’s stylesheet, so you don’t need to copy that over.
Tarski 2.6 brings support for new WordPress features, improves the API, and makes the theme far more amenable to customisation via child themes. A detailed list of changes is available in the changelog. Please note that WordPress 2.9 is required for this release.
You can also get this version as a Git tag.
We strongly recommend following the upgrade guide. Always back up your files and database before running a WordPress or Tarski upgrade. Please ensure that you upgrade WordPress before installing the new version of Tarski.
Child themes can now support their own custom headers and stylesheets. Simply create your child theme and add your new header images to the headers/ directory in the child theme, rather than in your version of Tarski. The same applies to custom stylesheets. This makes Tarski child themes far more powerful, and allows you to keep all your Tarski customisations in a child theme rather than having to worry about backing up files stored in your Tarski directory as well.
Tarski now supports the post thumbnails added in WordPress 2.9, as well as properly styling the captions added to images in WordPress 2.6.
For those of you using the Tarski API to modify the navbar, a couple of enhancements have been added. Firstly, the ‘Home’ and page links are now added to the navbar via the tarski_navbar filter, making it much easier to remove them if need be. Secondly, page and external links added to the navbar now have more meaningful array keys when they are passed to that filter, making them easier to manipulate programmatically.
HTML5 is the future of HTML, and using the HTML5 DOCTYPE in Tarski will make it easier to incorporate powerful new features in the future. There was a discussion of where this will lead in the comments on the 2.6 release candidates post.
As usual, there are many more tweaks, bug fixes and new features in Tarski 2.6 than I can go into here. Hope you enjoy the new version.
Please post bug reports, suggestions etc. on the forum.
Tags: 2.6, alternate styles, child themes, custom headers, release, WordPress 2.9
With WordPress 2.9 out of the door, I figured it was time to get the ball rolling on the latest Tarski release. There are some fairly extensive improvements to some areas of the internals, so I would very much appreciate some testing before I release the final version.
Highlights of the changes include drawing header images and alternate styles from child themes, support for the new post thumbnails, and a switch to the HTML5 DOCTYPE.
If you test it, can you send me the string of your tarski_options option both before and after the upgrade? You can get it from your database by running the following SQL query on the database where WordPress is installed.
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'tarski_options';Thanks!
Found some bugs in the upgrade routine already. RC2 is now out, use that instead.
Tags: 2.6, release candidate, WordPress 2.9
I’ve just released version 1.2 of my Designate plugin for WordPress. Designate allows you to specify individual custom stylesheets for every post and page on your site.
The new version cleans up the code a bit, and comes with far better documentation in the form of a README file and improved inline documentation. You can download it from here.
Tags: Designate
In response to a forum thread, I threw together a couple of plugins yesterday.
The first one is Display Excerpts, and it adds posts excerpts (should they exist) to the beginning of each post’s content area. The second is Only Excerpts, and it replaces posts on home and archive pages with their respective excerpts. The full post can be viewed at its permalink.
Both are also listed as example plugins.
Ever since I first released Tarski, people have asked “How do I do x?” Ever since I first added the hooks API to Tarski, my answer has often been “With a plugin.” However, there’s usually a follow-up request: “I don’t know how to do this; can you show me?”
It’s usually less work to write the code myself than to try to explain all the background knowledge someone will need to do it themselves, so I’ve ended up writing an awful lot of example plugins. For a while now I’ve wanted to list them somewhere on the site, so they’re easier to link to and keep updated, and today I finally got round to it.
You can see all my example plugins here.
Hopefully they’ll be of some use, both directly to users, and indirectly as a way to learn how to write simple WordPress plugins and interface with the Tarski API. I’ve separated them out into plugins that work with and require Tarski, and those that just use the normal WordPress API.
I’ve also published the plugin I use to customise the Tarski website, which may be of academic interest.
One question I get asked a lot is “How do I change the custom header size?” The answer is the Custom Header Resize plugin. All you need to do is change the values to reflect the size of custom header you’d like to use, and install the plugin.
For those of you who’d like to customise things further, here are a few pointers…
The plugin only defines two of the constants associated with custom headers, HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH and HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT. There are a few others which you could also define in the same way:
HEADER_TEXTCOLOR sets the colour of the text that would go over the header image. Tarski doesn’t use this value, but other themes do.NO_HEADER_TEXT is set to true by Tarski, because it doesn’t have an option to put text over the header. Again, this is more useful when using other themes.HEADER_IMAGE sets the default header image. In Tarski this is set to the image you chose on the Tarski options page, which would then be overridden by any custom header image you set up.Please note that if you have the WP_DEBUG constant set to true (this is usually only used by developers) then you’ll see a bunch of warnings as Tarski will attempt to redefine these constants. This will be fixed in the next version of Tarski.
Tags: custom headers, plugin
Tarski has always been ahead of the pack in terms of the number and quality of its translations, and today I’ve uploaded two new ones to our translations repository: an updated Polish translation from Marcin Gradzik and a new Romanian translation from the team at CNET.ro.