Perhaps the biggest change is the removal of our Ultimate Tag Warrior support in favour of the new ‘core’ WordPress tags system. Unless you’re running the 2.3 release candidate, this means your tags will disappear until you upgrade your WordPress installation and import your UTW tags. Tarski’s new tags page template, which you can see in action on our tags page, uses the new WP tag cloud.

While the overall goal of 1.7 was to make Tarski compatible with the new version of WordPress, we also took it as an opportunity to polish our code a bit and add a few helpful new features. As you can see by casting an eye up to the navbar, the ‘Home’ link can now be renamed. People have been asking for this for a while now, and I decided it was time to give in. You can change that on the Tarski Options page; look for the ‘Navigation Options’ header.

Speaking of the navbar, we’ve fixed an annoying issue where one had to re-save one’s Tarski options to get the navbar to reorder. It now reorders automatically whenever you save a page (since that’s when you change the Page Order value). The navbar output has also been added to the hooks system, which means two things: firstly, the constants.php file is now fully replaced (at least as far as it’s going to be), and that you can now add links to the navbar using a plugin. I hope to use this functionality to add a more elegant, user-friendly way to include external links.

The update notifier improvements in the last release have received a boost too, as the version check is now cacheable. To enable the cache, you need to make sure permissions on library/cache/ in your Tarski directory are set to 777. More details are available on the Update Notifier page.

For those who prefer to use a header image as their website title, and hide the actual title, I’ve improved the code so the alt attribute description is the site title when the title isn’t displayed, and the image itself links home (when you’re not on the front page, of course). A pinch of CSS means things should display as before, but the way things work is a bit more closely aligned with the expected behaviour (i.e., the site title links to the home page).

Category and author archives have had their first improvement in a long while: if there’s a description associated with them, they’re now displayed instead of the boring “This is a category archive for…” or “You are currently browsing so-and-so’s articles…”. So if you view my posts, you get a brief sentence about me instead of generic filler text. In addition to this, the document body now has an id which is set depending on which page you’re viewing, so you could make a particular author or category archive display in a certain way just by adding some extra code to your custom style. We’ve also assigned HTML classes to certain elements of the post metadata, so you can style those more easily.

As I detailed in my article on Tarski Plugin Integration, the support for specific plugins is now gone, so if you want to carry on using those plugins with Tarski I strongly recommend giving it a read.

Many thanks to everyone who helped me track down and fix the various bugs in Tarski 1.6; hopefully 1.7 won’t have the same problems. Enjoy the new version.

Please post bugs, suggestions and new translations on the forum.

WordPress’ plugin landscape is constantly changing: new plugins are released, older ones are abandoned by their creators. Functionality previously provided by plugins has been brought into the WordPress core code: first widgets, and in the upcoming 2.3 release, tags. Plugins relying on underlying third-party services like Gravatars and OpenID also change as these services run into problems or simply evolve in terms of their API.

This life-cycle is fairly normal, but our existing support for specific plugins in Tarski simply doesn’t acknowledge this reality. There are quite obviously too many plugins for us to support them all, or even a significant number of them. We’d also rather spend our time improving Tarski, rather than maintaining support for specific pieces of third-party code.

I say ’specific’ because what Tarski needs—and, in its theme hooks system, now has—is a generic way for plugin authors and users to make their code work with Tarski. It’s in need of better documentation, but it’s there, and it works; several times a week I offer advice to people on the forum as to how they can integrate their choice of plugin with Tarski.

Since the theme hooks system appeared in 1.5 we’ve been in a transition period, phasing out older ways of personalising Tarski installations (like the constants file). The next step is removing support for specific third-party plugins entirely, and that’s what we’re doing in Tarski 1.7. What follows is a rundown of the plugins, previously integrated with Tarski, that are having this support removed, and how you can add that functionality back in.

Widgets

WordPress Widgets are, as of WordPress 2.2, in the core WP code. As such, they’re still supported by Tarski, both in the sidebar and the footer. You can activate a widget-powered sidebar on the Tarski Options page.

OpenID

The extent of our OpenID support consists in testing a couple of plugins with Tarski and rewriting ugly OpenID URLs, so the status of this one doesn’t change: it works with Tarski, and should continue to do so.

Brian’s Latest Comments

The functionality offered by Brian’s Latest Comments plugin is now available in WordPress as a widget. Consequently, we’re simply removing the support for this altogether—if you want to carry on using it, use the widget.

Gravatars

Gravatar had some well-publicised problems, but is now back with a rejuvenated service. You can add Gravatars to Tarski (or any other theme, for that matter) by writing a plugin to buffer the Gravatar plugin function, extract the info, and add it into the comment content by adding a filter to the comment_text hook. The Using Gravatars page on the Codex has more.

Subscribe to Comments

The popular Subscribe to Comments plugin actually adds itself, if you upgrade to the latest version (which, of course, I recommend).

Live Comment Preview

Previewing comments is a feature I wish WordPress came with; Live Comment Preview is a JavaScript-powered halfway house towards fully-fledged preview functionality. It gets added automatically by the plugin, so the loss of integration isn’t a problem.

Clean Archives

The SRG Clean Archives plugin has long been part of our Archives template. No longer. However, I’ve made a Clean Archives template available for those who want this functionality. Just drop it into your Tarski directory and change its extension to .php, then select it as the template for your archives page as usual. I personally prefer version 2.2 of this plugin to the more recent, overly complex JavaScript-powered confection it seems to have become, but fortunately the plugin author has kept the older version available, and that’s what we’re still using. (Sean has responded in the comments.)

Ultimate Tag Warrior

Ultimate Tag Warrior is probably the highest-profile of the casualties. As of WordPress 2.3, tags are available in the WordPress core, and consequently Christine is discontinuing the plugin. Tarski 1.7 supports the new WordPress tags and removes all UTW-dependent code. There’s no going back on this one, I’m afraid, although for those on a nostalgia kick we will be maintaining the WordPress 1.6 branch for the time being, which retains UTW support.