alternate styles

When WordPress 2.1 was released, we made the mistake of not having a compatible version of Tarski ready. WordPress 2.3—which will be out pretty soon—includes a number of changes which will be significant for Tarski users, and consequently we were determined not to make the same mistake twice. Tarski 1.7 remains backwards-compatible with the WordPress 2.1/2.2 branch, but it’s decidedly forward-looking. You can mull over the details on the changelog.

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.

It’s definately evolution rather than revolution with this release. After we launched 1.1 I started tweaking, playing around with various niggles that were bothering me about the theme. You can go through all the details in the changelog.

New Features

Martin kindly did another header for this release, Thought Wind.

We’ve added another variant style, skyline.css. It’s very much in the same vein as the other styles, but for the official styles and headers I want to create a sense of variations on a theme, rather than radically different looks (you can always make your own if you want to do something completely different, after all).

There’s now also an option to swap the columns, with the sidebar appearing on the right and the content on the left. All the other columnated sections—navigation, comments, the footer—swap over as well if you choose this option. You can find it under ‘Miscellaneous Options’ at the bottom of the Tarski Options page (Presentation > Tarski Options in the WP admin panel, as always).

Chris has also done some excellent work revising the navigation bar. It now gets its links from the list of top-level pages—and you can choose which ones you want to appear. This option too appears on the Tarski Options page. Another advantage of doing it like this is that the links are no longer hardcoded; if you don’t have URL rewriting enabled, or have a different set of page slugs to ours, the links will still find your pages.

This change to the navigation bar does require you to select your desired pages in the Tarski Options page—don’t panic if there’s suddenly only a “Home” link after updating!

Tweaks

None of the tweaks will change anything major about Tarski—they just add a level of polish which was previously missing. Feed links now find your correct feed addresses, rather than just linking to /feed/; titles that are longer than one line of text will space themselves properly; various bits of “under the hood” code have been cleaned up or streamlined.

Just one note: the page.php file is now redundant, so make sure you delete it when you upgrade Tarski.

If you use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, you’ll be glad to hear that Tarski now includes complete support for its features: we’ve added the option to activate the live tag search feature on the tags page. The plugin does a pretty terrible job of separating content and presentation from behaviour, so the way it operates and displays isn’t as elegant as I’d like. C’est la vie.

As always, post any bugs or problems you have in the comments. We really appreciate your response; it makes the job worthwhile.