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.

Obviously the major change is the new Tarski Options page, with an overhauled appearance as well as completely renovated markup. Functionally it’s little different, but it’s much better put together from a design perspective. Most of the help text, labels and so on were completely rewritten, so there’s a new POT file on the localisation page.

There’s also a new sidebar customisation option: those of you who like to write your own code can now make a user-sidebar.php file and tinker to your heart’s content.

Legacy version, 1.2.5

We’re actually releasing two versions today; the other one is Tarski 1.2.5, which has an even shorter changelog entry—just one item. 1.2.5 is a legacy version, intended for those who can’t (or won’t) get WordPress 2.1 or higher, which 1.3 requires. You can download it from the Legacy Versions page.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped us with Tarski; hope you enjoy the new release.

Bugs and suggestions on the forum as always.

The changelog has all the details, the highlight of which is obviously a new header by Martin. He actually made Orbits a while ago but it slipped our collective mind and so wasn’t included until now.

I also did a fair bit of CSS work for this version, including some improvements to our rather rudimentary print stylesheet, and a new stylesheet for those writing in RTL languages. Not actually being able to read or write Hebrew, Arabic etc. I’m sure there are plenty of problems with it, so if you use Tarski and a language that is written from right to left, please leave some feedback on the forum so we can improve on what we’ve done so far.

While we’re on the subject of languages, we’ve removed the language files from the theme download, as I explained the other day. The Older/Newer post links are still a holdout in the universalisation process; there’s a fix in the pipeline for a future version but I’m afraid it didn’t make it into this release.

Bugs and suggestions on the forum as always.

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.

The changelog has all the gory details, but here’s a brief run-down of the changes. Firstly, our wonderful translation team has expanded the scope of the Swedish, Dutch and German translations currently available to cover the Tarski Options page and a few other bits of text which were missed or omitted (by me, not them) during the initial localisation work.

As always we discovered our own needs exceeded what the software was capable of, so we’ve added several more theme hooks to allow the insertion of text or objects (adverts, for example) at the end of posts and pages, as well as the ability for you to write custom 404 error messages. Instead of just linking back to your front page you could link visitors to your archives or tag page, or include a search field.

This release should also be compatible with WordPress 2.1: we’ve updated various things like links listings and the navbar code to make them work with the new functions and database schema present in 2.1. If you find any incompatibilities between this release and WordPress 2.1, or that we’ve broken anything in WP 2.0.x, please let us know so we can get a patch out quickly!

Lastly, we’ve fixed a number of bugs and tidied up the code in various places. A number of little scripts have been made into functions and can now be found in functions.php, which leaves the markup skeleton a lot tidier and easier to read and amend.

Many thanks to all our contributors, especially our tireless translation team, and I hope you enjoy using Tarski 1.2.2.

Please post any bugs or suggestions on the forum.

Since most people won’t want to trudge through the changelog, here’s a brief list of some of the major things we’ve added, many of them after user requests.

There are now links to next and previous entries in individual archive pages, so people can navigate from entry to entry. There’s also pagination support for posts and pages, so you can make multiple-page posts and pages.

Also included is the pagination of index pages (like category and date archives, the front page, and so on). This is completely optional: you can enable or disable it at will from the Tarski Options page.

There’s some under-the-hood stuff, like better trackback and language support (so that people can do translations: more on this later). We’ve also added more theme hooks, and done default styling for a number of additional HTML elements.

Styling & Markup

Two things in this release: firstly, we’ve added insert classes (see the contents listing on the Docs & Help page for an example) to let you add things like updates and menus without having to write your own CSS. I’ll probably write up a brief tutorial some time in the next few days.

Secondly, and more majorly, Tarski’s positioning markup has been substantially rewritten. This will most likely break some people’s custom styles, which is why I hesitated so long over making the changes, but I’m convinced that they will not only make it easier for people to write custom styles but that it will also make working with those styles a much more enjoyable experience.

The new code is more streamlined, more global, and better laid-out. I hope you’ll take advantage of the many improvements in 1.2, break your old styles, and rewrite them under the new system.

Experienced CSS coders will be able to evaluate the changes just by looking at the code, but here’s the executive summary, culled from the roadmap’s notes on this change:

CSS Rewrite Notes

The plan is to replace the numerous, purpose-written classes and ids with a simpler, standardised system. The two basic building-blocks currently being worked on include a content class—for areas like blog entries, text widgets, the ‘about’ text, and so on—and a couple of positioning classes, probably primary and secondary, for the creation of floated columns.

A fairly thorough pruning and re-organisation of the main style.css file will probably be carried out at the same time. New documentation may be added to help people writing alternate styles to easily manipulate our styling system.

Localisation

We were going to wait, so we could include translations in this version, but we decided just to get 1.2 out there and release new versions as and when translations arrive. You can download the from our localisation page.

Please post translation submissions on the forum, it makes it a lot easier for us if support and modification stuff goes through there. Alternatively, if you’re feeling shy, you could email me with your work.

In Closing

Many, many thanks to our beta testers and the various problems they reported. Tarski 1.2 is undoubtedly a more polished release due to their hard work.

That’s all for now, ladies and gentlemen; we hope you enjoy using Tarski 1.2.

As always, post any bugs (and there will be some, despite the devoted efforts of our testers) on the forum.