This tutorial has been superceded by the Alternate Styles tutorial. Please follow the instructions there, which have been rewritten and improved.
Ben and I keep an eye on Technorati for new Tarski installs, and one thing I’m noticing is that many people seem to be editing their Tarski style.css file to make colour scheme changes and other tweaks.
While this works, with Tarski 1.1 we offer a much nicer way of doing it - alternate styles. Creating an alternate style instead of editing style.css ensures that your changes are preserved when you next upgrade Tarski.
Doing this is really quite simple - just upload your custom CSS file to the wp-content/themes/tarski/styles/ directory. For example, on my personal blog, I’ve uploaded a file called “ceejayoz.css” with a few tweaks.
Once this is done, all you need to do to activate the alternate style is to go to the Tarski Options page and select the name of your CSS file in the “Alternate Styles” option.
What if I wanted to use (for example) the polar.css alternate style that comes with Tarski 1.1, as well as having personal tweaks? This is also easy - just create a custom style, as already discussed, and put the following code at the top:
@import url(polar.css);
Body classes
When you use a custom stylesheet with Tarski, the theme will automatically apply a class to the body element. So, if you load polar.css from the Tarski options page, you’ll get a line of code like this: <body class="polar">.
This allows you to easily override the style rules in style.css, the theme’s main stylesheet. So, for example, if you were using a custom stylesheet called example.css and you wanted to change the colour of the h3 element, you might have a rule like this:
body.example h3 {
color: #bf6060;
}
A good way to change things is to open up one of the included styles, such as classic.css, and examine how it modifies the basic stylesheet. If you want to make more substantial changes, just look in style.css to see what rules control the presentation of the theme.
Ben did a new header, Coffee Rings, and we’ve added a blank header image for those who prefer a minimal look.