Perhaps most importantly, the header selection code in the Tarski Options page has been almost completely rewritten, although it preserves the same functionality as before. Where before it relied on JavaScript being enabled in the user’s browser, it now degrades gracefully—when JavaScript and CSS are disabled, it will still be functional, building up from an HTML skeleton rather than down from a JavaScript implementation. For this you can thank Chris Erwin, author of the Checkbox & Radio Input Replacement script that makes our new header selection code tick, and Richard Fliam who did some sterling work making our implementation compatible with Internet Explorer.

In line with other changes being phased into the WordPress admin panel, we’ve switched our required JavaScript library to jQuery, which now does the show and hide legwork for the sidebar options selection. The comments file has also been rewritten, stripping out some forty lines of code and resulting in a cleaner, leaner and more maintenance-friendly file.

We’ve also fixed several bugs, including both a recently introduced one where the ‘Author’ field in the comments form was being filled by the author link of the last commenter, and a very long-standing one where comments display was screwed up for users of the ‘Recent Articles’ sidebar widget (many thanks to Peter Cawley for providing this and other fixes).

The new update notification system will hopefully pass unnoticed, as a seamless replacement for the old one. Essentially it’s just an Atom feed, which Tarski checks whenever you visit the Dashboard or Tarski Options page (I may look into caching results for the next version). This is more secure, and allows the notification text to be translated—something that wasn’t possible with the old system. Niels Leenheer’s Feedparser does the heavy lifting.

1.5 translations have been frozen and the latest translations can be found in the translations trunk directory as usual. Just as a heads-up, this will probably be our last major release before WordPress 2.3 comes out. Enjoy the rest of your summer, and we’ll see you in September for Tarski 1.7.

Bugs, suggestions and new translations to the forum please.