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.

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.

Download Tarski 2.6

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.

Better child themes

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.

Post thumbnails & image captions

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.

More customisable navbar

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.

Now in HTML5

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.

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!

Update

Found some bugs in the upgrade routine already. RC2 is now out, use that instead.

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.

Download Tarski 2.5

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.

Fixes & enhancements

Tarski 2.5 fixes a number of bugs, most of which were very minor. Its widget code has been extensively overhauled to meet the new standard interfaces introduced in WordPress 2.8.

The Recent Articles widget has been almost completely rewritten. Not only can it now be used in multiple widget areas, but the title it displays and the number of articles listed are now customisable.

Support for right-to-left languages has improved again, thanks to mark-k on the forum. I hope to build on this for 2.6 and improve the way the options page displays for RTL language users as well.

In the spirit of progressive enhancement, users with more recent browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Chrome will hopefully notice the improved styling of form submit buttons.

Deprecations and diminishment

As many of you noticed, this release has taken a lot longer than usual to come out. This wasn’t because it was an especially complex release (it wasn’t; despite the length of the changelog, the changes in 2.4 were much more substantial), but because I no longer have as much time as I once did to work on Tarski.

As a result, I’m rethinking how I approach the upkeep of the theme. I’d rather spend my time as a programmer than a janitor, so the changes I’m making ought to ensure that Tarski continues to be updated with each new version of WordPress, while eliminating a few of the headaches that have built up over the years.

No more default widgets

In the last version, I added a set of default widgets to Tarski’s widget areas. This was, I thought, a nice piece of functionality; the only problem was that it relied too much on private WordPress internals, rather than the public API. Unsurprisingly, the internals changed (for the better—these changes were at the heart of the improved widget support), and my code no longer worked.

Rather than rewrite it, with the possibility of it breaking with the next WordPress release, I’ve removed it altogether. If a new, approved, public way is added to allow this functionality then I’ll reinstate the defaults, but until then, new users will just have to put up with things looking a bit bare until they add their widget selections.

User sidebar file deprecated

Because widgets are now settled as the way to customise WordPress sites, I’ve deprecated the user-sidebar.php file. Support for it will be removed entirely in Tarski 2.6.

Constants file deprecated

Considered a legacy API since the introduction Tarski’s extensive hooks API (a far superior way to extend the theme), the constants file is now deprecated entirely. Support for it will be removed in Tarski 2.6.

Subversion repository no longer maintained

Tarski 2.5 will also be the last release available from the Subversion repository. Again, I have a limited amount of time, and I’d prefer to spend any time I do have to work on Tarski writing code, rather than keeping two version control repositories in sync. Anyone wanting to maintain a public Subversion repository is, of course, entirely welcome to do so.

Support forum hanging on, for now

The forum is probably the most time-consuming thing of all. I’m not planning on shutting it altogether, but my activity there will drop a bit further. Tarski is an exceptionally well-documented theme, and there are literally hundreds of forum discussions covering a vast number of user questions. For those who want to make changes, there is example code in abundance.

As always, hope you enjoy the new version.

Please post bug reports and suggestions on the forum.

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.

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.

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.