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.

However, the most major features are the bugs fixed. To begin with, the navbar now reorders correctly, and no longer needs to save that order when pages are saved; more efficient and better-written code makes it all happen dynamically.

A problem with Tarski’s options saving and updating code was exposed by the new multiple authors checking instituted in 2.0.3, with the result that the save-and-restore no longer worked properly: restoring one’s options after deleting them would merely save the defaults to the database. The underlying issues have now been fixed.

On the new features front is one I know I’ll appreciate as I continue to improve Tarski: the code behind the version check is now a lot smarter. It used to just check whether the version grabbed from the stylesheet and the one in the database—now it can tell whether any given version is newer or older than the installed version, which lets us do things like show a notice on the Dashboard notifying the user that they’re using a development version.

Lastly, I appropriated some WordPress widget code to rewrite the recent articles section, with the result that it’s now added via an action hook, th_fmain, and can consequently be removed by a plugin as well as through the Options page. The recent articles’ excerpts also have WordPress’ excerpt filters applied to them too, so any plugin which adds or removes those filters will now work as expected on Tarski’s excerpts.

Enjoy the new version; all being well, it’ll be the last before Tarski 2.1, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it.

Please post bugs and suggestions on the forum.

The update notifier has been the subject of a few improvements, including adding support for PHP’s own file_get_contents function for people whose servers don’t have libcurl installed. Its error handling has also been made more robust, so when required PHP components aren’t available it will let users know what the issue is and how to resolve it.

If you want to use images as links but don’t like borders, the new imagelink2 image class will let you do that simply and easily.

There are a few text changes in this version, so if people could provide updated translations (shouldn’t take long) that would be wonderful.

Bugs and suggestions to the forum please.

Jordan is the man to thank for the major fixes: he’s written a new, more efficient feed parser for the update notifier that should eliminate the memory limitation issues a couple of people had, and added an increased level of robustness to the options updater.

There are also fixes for a couple of CSS bugs, one where the navbar would disappear when only title and tagline were set to not display, and another where the next/previous post navigation disappeared in Internet Explorer.

Lastly, Tarski’s stylesheets are now added via the wp_head hook, and they can now be filtered. This means if you want to replace the stylesheets entirely, and just use the markup skeleton, you can do it without editing header.php. You could also use it to, for example, add per-page stylesheets or change the URLs to point to a separate file server.

Bugs, suggestions etc. to the forum as always.

The first fix is to make the update notifier work on servers where allow_url_fopen is disabled, such as the popular Dreamhost. Please note that if your server has allow_url_fopen disabled, you must enable caching by setting the cache directory’s permissions to 777. Otherwise, you’ll just get a “No connection to update server” message. Thanks to janzo on the forum for pointing this issue out.

The asides selector on the Options page has also received a small tweak, to bring it in line with expected behaviour: all post categories are now selectable as asides, even if they currently don’t have any posts in. Thanks to lecrocq on the forum for noticing this one.

Work on the next version of Tarski continues apace, and as always you can keep track of major changes via a quick glance at the roadmap. The technically-minded amongst you can also browse the latest development build. The next version will probably be released in early November, depending on my other commitments.

Bugs and suggestions to the forum as always.

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.

First up is a rudimentary mobile stylesheet; something I’ve been meaning to add for ages but only recently got round to. It’s not amazing, but it’s functional and preserves the Tarski aesthetic.

The theme hooks system has been massively overhauled, with the clunky and simplistic constants.php replaced by the custom plugin hooks system I described recently. Check out library/tarski-hooks.php for the hooks, and library/constants-hooks.php for the bridge between that and the existing constants.php file, which is still supported as a legacy system (and a simpler one for the less PHP-savvy amongst us).

Amongst the other new features are better OpenID comments support, and thanks to one user’s intervention there’s also much better support for static front pages—which just goes to show, if you bring an issue up in the forum there’s a decent chance something will be done about it.

Other than that, there are the usual tweaks and bug fixes. Thanks as always to those who’ve contributed translations, suggestions, and code, especially to Jordan Liggitt who solved a problem with the older and newer entries navigation.

A quick note on translations: translations for Tarski 1.4 have been frozen here, translations for 1.5 will be added to the translations directory as they come in. The .pot file in that directory is up-to-date.

Bug reports, suggestions and translations to the forum please.

First, something I’m quite pleased with - Tarski now works right out-of-the-box with WordPress MU. The theme will now auto-detect WPMU and tweak its functioning accordingly; the specifics are in the changelog. We’ve been pleased to see networks like WordPress.com and Edublogs picking up Tarski, and we hope this makes it easier to implement.

Fans of custom header images will be happy to hear that we’ve plugged WordPress’s custom header functionality into Tarski, so you can upload new header images with ease.

In the interests of cleaning up the database a little bit, and making it easier to change options via the database and so on, we’ve combined all the various tarski_blahblahblah options into one array. An upgrade script is included and will run automatically (it’s also available in library/upgrade-to-1.4.php if you prefer, or wish to peruse). Note: The very first pageview after upgrading may have some SQL errors - just ignore them and refresh the page, they should disappear.

Most of the bug fixes are things we should have fixed ages ago, to do with the display of comments when the columns have been swapped. In all honesty it had just slipped our minds, so thank you to those of you who posted about this issue on the forum.

Other than that, there’s a small localisation issue fix (which again, several people pointed out on the forum), and a bit of footer triage: the default ‘About’ header has been removed and the blurb has moved above the recent articles listing. If you want the header back you can add it in via the Options page, but you don’t have to.

Thanks again to everyone who’s pointed out bugs and contributed translations; hope you enjoy the new release.

Point out bugs or add suggestions on the forum.

The changelog is briefer than usual, but I like to think this is a good thing: there were fewer things to fix. A couple of them could have been classified as ‘tweaks’, specifically the Internet Explorer issues, but since they broke the proper display of some elements in that browser it seemed more accurate to call them bugs.

If we receive more translations before the next major version comes out, we’d be happy to release another iteration of the 1.2.x branch. All the details, as ever, are on the localisation page. It’s great that Tarski is now available in five languages (other than English), but we’d very much like to add to that. Various feature additions and amendments are planned to improve matters still further on this front, but if you have any suggestions don’t hesitate to post them on the forum.

Thanks again to everyone who’s helped us out with Tarski, particularly those who’ve contributed translations and brought bugs to our attention, and I hope you enjoy using Tarski 1.2.3.

Bugs and suggestions should be posted on the forum.

An updated POT is now up. I know this has been frustrating our translators so it’s cheering to finally have a fix. If there are any other bits of text that aren’t yet localisable, please let us know in the forum or in the comments on this post.

In addition to this, we’re still looking for more translations for 1.2.3, so if you’re able to translate Tarski into another language (that hasn’t already been covered by someone else) please get in touch.