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.

September 15, 2008 by Benedict Eastaugh | Permalink

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.

September 3, 2008 by Benedict Eastaugh | 1 comment

2.3 Release

August 10, 2008 by Benedict Eastaugh | 33 comments

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.

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I don’t usually publicise release candidate downloads, but because Tarski 2.3 includes some fairly major changes to its upgrade process, I thought it could benefit from wider testing than I can manage alone.

The usual caveats about pre-release software apply: don’t use it on a production site, run it locally or on a development server with a copy of your production database. If you have Subversion, you can get it from our svn trunk.

Please post any bugs or feedback on the forum.

August 3, 2008 by Benedict Eastaugh | 3 comments

Tarski 2.2 is now also available from the new WordPress theme directory. It’s the same code, of course, but this should give it slightly more exposure. Many thanks to Joseph Scott for sorting out some problems I had. I’ve published some more personal thoughts on WordPress 2.6 and Tarski 2.2 over at Extralogical.

July 19, 2008 by Benedict Eastaugh | Permalink

2.2 Release

July 19, 2008 by Benedict Eastaugh | 16 comments

Tarski 2.2 improves Tarski’s compatibility with WordPress 2.6, tidies up various parts of the hooks API, improves performance, and adds a much cleverer navbar link selector. Details are in the changelog as per usual.

In my view, the best part of this release is a vastly improved navbar selector. It’s a major improvement over the old implementation for a few reasons, firstly because it actually shows you the structure of your pages: they’re not just a big long list, but a properly indented tree that allows you to see just where in the overall structure of your site a given page fits.

Secondly, some people have a lot of pages. Until now, if that was the case, the navbar selector would utterly overwhelm the options page. Now it doesn’t have to: each sub-list is collapsible, so you can reduce the list to just what you need to see at any one time. I’ve found it a great help . Which lists are collapsed and which aren’t is saved in the database, so if you collapse a load of menus you won’t find them expanding out again next time you visit the Tarski options page.

Performance improvements have been gleaned by only loading Tarski’s library of administrative functionality when you’re actually using the WordPress admin page, not for every visitor hitting your front page. In addition to this, paginating archive and search pages is now the default, and the code that removes pagination and shows all the results for a given year, tag or search query has been reimplemented in a more optimised way that generally reduces the number of database queries required to generate the page by a significant number.

Additionally, changes in the WordPress core in version 2.6 has allowed me to deprecate a large chunk of Tarski code in favour of simpler and more elegant WordPress API calls. This makes the Tarski codebase more maintainable and also helps with performance. Removing a few unnecessary Tarski API hooks also helps with this.

Lastly, I’ve tidied up Tarski’s gallery and image support a bit so it fits in better with the gallery functionality added in WordPress 2.5 and updated in 2.6. Galleries should now be styled a little more nicely, and individual image pages are cleaner. Hope you enjoy the new version.

Support requests should go in the forum as usual.

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2.1.4 Release

July 13, 2008 by Benedict Eastaugh | 13 comments

Tarski 2.1.4 contains a vital compatibility fix for anyone upgrading to WordPress 2.6. If you’re planning on installing WordPress 2.6, install this update immediately, before you upgrade your WordPress installation. Following the upgrade guide is generally a good idea.

Always back up your files and database before running a WordPress or Tarski upgrade.

It appears that options are now being automatically unserialised, which means that when Tarski attempts to unserialise the already-unserialised tarski_options object, an error gets thrown which breaks a bunch of stuff. All of which means, upgrade now, or you might potentially lose your Tarski options.

Tarski 2.2 is still in production, and will add some nice functionality as well as some performance improvements and a fair bit of tidying. I’ve backported a couple of bug-fixes from 2.2 to 2.1.4, so you don’t have to wait for them.

Issues with this release should be posted on the forum.

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2.1 Release

May 20, 2008 by Benedict Eastaugh | 30 comments

Tarski 2.1 includes a number of enhancements, including a fully widget-based footer area, avatar support, and a reworked options page in line with the new WordPress admin interface. Details are in the changelog as always.

Upgrade guide

  1. Back up any custom stylesheets, sidebars etc.
  2. Switch to the default theme
  3. Update your Tarski files
  4. Put your custom files back
  5. Switch back to Tarski

Changing themes ensures that Tarski isn’t running while you update your files, and triggers the upgrade routine (visiting the Tarski options page is another way to do this, if you’re just running svn up for example).

Recently I’ve been contributing the odd patch to the WordPress core, and coupled with the many other huge improvements in WordPress 2.5, the result has been that I’ve been able to remove a few things from Tarski. The ability to choose which feed type is linked to by default, for example, has been added to WordPress, and so it’s been dropped from Tarski.

Widgets

I also decided to finally give in to the inevitable, and drop Tarski’s native sidebar implementation in favour of the widgets it’s had since version 1.1.2. If you’re using the Tarski sidebar, don’t worry: your settings will be automatically converted into widgets. If you’re using a custom sidebar file, that will be picked up too: if it’s there it’ll be used, overriding the widget sidebar, and if it isn’t, it won’t.

The main footer area is now a widget field, too, and Tarski’s recent articles code has been rewritten as a widget, so you can either keep things as they are, or start customising madly. Tarski’s hooks system has received a number of additions, so anyone building their website on top of Tarski should find it that much easier to make adjustments. Some 2.1 developer notes will be forthcoming once I find the time to finish writing them up.

Avatars & icons

After being absent for a few versions, avatars are now back, courtesy of the native WordPress implementation in 2.5. You’ll be able to see them in action by commenting on this post.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to freshen up the theme with some new icons. Obviously if you want to use them in any other GPL-compatible project then you’re free to do so.

Options page

Obviously the biggest change in WordPress 2.5 is the new admin interface, and Tarski’s options page has received a thorough overhaul too. The last time we made such a big change was in version 1.3—almost a year ago. Things have come on a fair bit since then. Enjoy the new version.

Bugs and suggestions on the forum please.

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We’ve just moved the Tarski website to a new server; thus far, everything seems to be working. If you do run into any problems, please let us know.

April 18, 2008 by Benedict Eastaugh | 10 comments

Tarski’s changelog is now included in our svn repository, and having automated the process I’ve been updating the public one far more frequently. This means you can now see all the major changes without having to read the commit logs.

April 4, 2008 by Benedict Eastaugh | Permalink

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