I’ve upgraded the Tarski forum to Vanilla 2.0 and cleaned up the spam. This should make it usable again. Apologies for letting it get so out of hand.
Tarski 2.7 adds compatibility with many WordPress 3.0 features, including custom backgrounds. A detailed list of changes is available in the changelog. Please note that WordPress 3.0 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.
Overriding templates
Child themes can now override many of Tarski’s built-in template fragments. Simply create a file of the appropriate name in the app/templates directory of your child theme (you’ll have to create this) and add a file of the appropriate name—Tarski will use it automatically. For example, you could replace the template Tarski displays when there are no posts by adding a no_posts.php file.
Compressed assets
There are also some client-side performance improvements: the theme’s graphics are slightly better compressed, and minified versions of Tarski’s CSS and JavaScript are served by default. The full stylesheets and JS files are of course included with the theme download, so there’s nothing stopping you changing them and then re-minifying (although I would in general recommend using a custom stylesheet or child theme rather than making changes to the theme directly, as this will hamper your ability to upgrade it).
This release also contains numerous small improvements and bug fixes. There are a lot of WordPress 3.0 releases I just didn’t have time to add support for, but hopefully those can be added before too long. If anyone would like to contribute those changes, please take a look at the outstanding issues and fork the project on GitHub. Hope you enjoy the new version.
Please post bug reports, suggestions etc. on the forum.
Tags: 2.7.0, child themes, custom backgrounds, release, WordPress 3.0
I have finally got round to transferring all existing Tarski translations to a new, separate translations repository on GitHub. Thanks for your patience; I know the current situation has been unsatisfactory for a long time.
I am looking for a maintainer for this repository: someone who can generate the POT file for new versions of Tarski, and upload new translations when people make them.
One thing that I think would improve things a lot for users would be a simpler way of downloading individual translation files, without having to do an extensive search through the repository. I’m open to suggestions as to how this might be accomplished.
Translations for Tarski 2.6
So far I’ve received three updated translations for Tarski 2.6: German, Bulgarian and Formal Spanish. Thanks to Andreas Beer, Vesselin Petkov and Eduardo Larequi for providing those.
We also now have a translation into Belorussian from Marcis G. Special thanks to him for badgering me until I got round to sorting all of this out.
Tags: localisation, translations
I’ve just uploaded a POT file for Tarski 2.6, to make translating the latest version of Tarski easier. Translations are currently still in our old Subversion repository on Google Code; I want to move them to GitHub and make it easier for people to download and work with them, but that requires some time I haven’t got right now. If anyone wants to volunteer to help out with this, let me know.
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.
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.
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!
Update
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