Tarski » CSS

2.0.1 Release

Ben Eastaugh — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:22:17 +0000

With any major Tarski release, I know that there are bugs which won’t rear their ugly heads until it’s in the wild. Tarski 2.0.1 fixes the ones that have shown themselves so far. Details are in the changelog.

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.

Roadmap Update

Ben Eastaugh — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:32:55 +0000

I’ve updated the roadmap with some more information on the changes that will appear in the next version of Tarski.

Tick Different

Ben Eastaugh — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 13:30:54 +0000

Tick Different is based on Tarski. Gorgeous colours combine into a dark, rich style—reminds me of expensive chocolate.

WordPress 2.0.5 will be out fairly soon, and as soon as the release version arrives we’ll be testing it to ensure Tarski’s compatibility.

New Alternate Styles Tutorial

Ben Eastaugh — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 19:04:24 +0000

We’ve just added a new, revised version of our original alternate styles tutorial. The new Alternate Styles page resides in its rightful place in the Docs & Help section, and has been substantially rewritten for greater clarity and to correct a couple of errors. The original article is now defunct, so if you have any links pointing there please update them.

Pink Tentacle

Ben Eastaugh — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 17:45:56 +0000

Pink Tentacle shows just how much you can do with Tarski’s alternate styles.

Douten’s Tarski Mod

Ben Eastaugh — Tue, 09 May 2006 23:43:15 +0000

Douten has done a lovely modification of Tarski. Might have been an idea to use Tarski’s alternate styles to make the changes, though…

Alternate Styles with Tarski

Chris Sternal-Johnson — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 21:50:49 +0000

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: .

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.