Luca Sabato ported Tarski to Textpattern. It’s a lovely piece of work, and makes Textpattern the latest in a string of other platforms that Tarski has been ported to.
Tarski’s designer and code-mangler-in-chief, Ben also writes over at Extralogical.
I ran this plugin up for a friend the other day, and thought other people might find it useful: Category Stylesheets. It lets you add category-specific stylesheets to your site. Once you’ve installed the plugin you just need to add a file named category-n.css (where n is the category ID) to your theme directory. The stylesheet will be used on category archive pages for that category, and single posts in that category.
I’ve finally got round to updating the Tarski hooks reference, so that piece of documentation is now up to date for Tarski 2.4.
The entire process is now automated, pulling the documentation straight from the inline documentation in the Tarski source code, so further updates to the hooks reference will happen entirely silently as new releases of Tarski come out.
If you’re interested in the code I use to do this, it’s available on GitHub.
Tags: documentation, hooks
Since the core team decided to do another release candidate, I thought I’d put one out too. Get it while it’s hot.
Tarski 2.4 RC2 has much better trackback support, adds an extra save button to the bottom of the options page, and improves the update notifier’s HTTP transport checking. There are also various bits of refactoring that shouldn’t impact on the user experience. I should also note that the tag is on GitHub if you want to grab it that way.
WordPress 2.7 is going to be released very soon, and a pretty stable release candidate is available, so now seems like an appropriate moment to put an RC of our own up for download.
Tarski 2.4 RC1 is essentially feature-complete; it will only work on WordPress 2.7, so if you have WordPress 2.6 or earlier, don’t install this version of Tarski. Bug reports are extremely welcome and should be posted on the forum.
Update: Ryan Boren tells us that “The final release of 2.7 won’t be here until next week.” Tarski 2.4 will follow shortly after that.
Tarski is now available as a Git repository, so if you’d like to use Git to follow Tarski development, you can now clone our Tarski repository, hosted on the glorious GitHub.
Demetris from op111.net has written a very generous review of Tarski and two other clean, minimalist themes. He writes that
What is important is Tarski’s quality as a project, its options, its features and its extensibility.
Tomorrow morning I’m going to be heading off on my first proper holiday for over a year, so people with support requests and questions are going to have to wait for ten days or so. Thanks in advance for your patience. I’d also like to thank the numerous kind souls who’ve sent things from my Amazon wishlist. Your generosity is greatly appreciated, and reassures me that I’ve not completely wasted my time working on Tarski over the last couple of years.
Tarski 2.3 adds full compatibility with the SSL admin enhancements from WordPress 2.6, and adds a number of security, stability and compatibility improvements. Details are available in the changelog. Please note that WordPress 2.6 is required for this release.
WordPress 2.6 introduced better support for a secure connection to the administrative area, which Ryan Boren covered pretty thoroughly in this article. Tarski 2.3 adds full support for this functionality, so you should now be able to save your Tarski options when using the admin area over SSL. However, due to the use of a number of new functions, WordPress 2.6 is a requirement.
A couple of minor security improvements have also been made. The Tarski options page can now only be accessed by users with the edit_themes capability. WordPress’ role system wraps around a capability-based user model, and it’s more secure to tie functionality to those capabilities than to roles which are more malleable.
As well as fixing a bug in the Links template, a number of tweaks have been made to improve Tarski’s performance and reliability. A long-standing problem with the upgrade process, where widget sidebar settings might be lost, has now been fixed. Tarski is also more reliant on WordPress’ own APIs, which should allow it to take advantage of performance and stability improvements made in the WordPress core.
In addition to this, the new navbar selector introduced in Tarski 2.2 is now fully compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and 7. There weren’t any reports of problems, presumably because Tarski users are more discriminating than the median internet citizen, but good cross-browser compatibility is a worthy goal nonetheless.
Thank you to everyone who tested the release candidates; I can only assume from the lack of responses that everything worked perfectly. Enjoy the new release.
Please post bugs and suggestions on the forum.
Tags: Internet Explorer, security, SSL, WordPress 2.6
2.4 Release
December 11, 2008 by Ben Eastaugh | 32 comments
Tarski 2.4 adds support for new WordPress 2.7 features including threaded comments and the redesigned admin panel. Details are available in the changelog. Please note that WordPress 2.7 is required for this release.
Download Tarski 2.4
You can also get this release as a Git tag or a Subversion tag or branch.
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.
Tarski 2.3 was an extremely stable release, so while there are a lot of changes in 2.4, they’re almost all in support of new features. A lot of behind-the-scenes work to make Tarski’s code cleaner, more robust and compatible with WordPress 2.7 has taken place, but the interesting parts for most users will be the two major functionality changes to comments and the options page.
Tarski now supports the new threaded comments functionality added in WordPress 2.7. Threading and paging are both built into the WP core, and are pretty configurable from the admin panel. One can decide whether comments should be paginated, and if so, how many top-level comments should appear on each page (if threading is disabled, all comments will be top-level ones). The maximum level of nesting can be set from 1 to 10, and comment threads can be set to automatically close after a certain period of time.
The changes made to accommodate this new functionality mean that Tarski’s comments are now ‘inline’ with the main content area, and are no longer forced down by the sidebar. This decision was difficult to make; Tarski’s distinctive comments were, to my mind, one of the more elegant features of the theme and the limitations they imposed were minor compared to the benefits of better spacing and a decent content area for comments to fit into. However, given Tarski’s ability to swap columns around and the need to support RTL languages, the development and ongoing support burden would have been too much, given the vast amounts of added complexity that the new comments system brings.
Obviously the biggest user-facing change in WordPress 2.7 is the new, completely redesigned admin panel. When it became clear just how radical the changes were, I decided that despite the Tarski options page being thoroughly overhauled not too long ago in version 2.1, I had to revisit both the aesthetics and the functionality. The result is, I think, a cleaner and more effective options page which doesn’t feel out of place in the new admin area.
There have also been some changes to the way options are saved to the database: Tarski now uses the WordPress generic admin
POSThandler, which both leads to more modular code and bakes in a certain amount of additional security protection. Furthermore, building on the security improvements in version 2.3, the options handlers now check the referrer to protect against CSRF attacks—a type of attack that Tarski’s login and logout links are also now hardened against, thanks to Mark Jaquith’s thoughtfulness.Tarski’s update notifier now uses the new HTTP API, which has several advantages over Tarski’s native update notifier code. To begin with, it will work across a far wider range of transports, potentially making update notifications available to many more people whose servers don’t support
libcurlorfsockopen. Just as importantly, it will be supported by the core WordPress team, reducing the amount of complex and highly specialised code in Tarski. This leaves me more time to focus on Tarski’s core competencies and reduces the opportunities for bugs in the update notifier (something that has been an ongoing issue ever since it was introduced).Thanks to those who tested the release candidates; I hope everyone enjoys using the new version.
Please post any bugs or suggestions on the forum.
Tags: 2.4, HTTP API, options page, threaded comments, update notifier, WordPress 2.7