customisability

We’ve changed the way we’re deploying translations again: the new plan is for all translations for the latest version of the theme to be available here, on our Subversion repository. This allows us the full versioning support afforded by svn.

Our current plan is to freeze a set of translations for each major point release, and keep the main /translations directory constantly updated as new translations come in. New translations in languages we haven’t got are, of course, always welcome; please post them on the forum as usual.

Tarski 1.4 is available in seven languages, and it would be great to bump that number a bit. Thanks as always go out to the members of the community who’ve taken the time to provide translations.

All the info you should need on translations is available on the localisation page.

Tarski 1.2.2 contains numerous bug fixes and tweaks to improve both Tarski’s stability and its flexibility.

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.

After however months it’s been since our last release, Tarski 1.2 is finally here. Here’s the changelog, which gives details on the various fixes, tweaks and new features.

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.

The roadmap has been updated to give a more accurate and complete picture of what’s going to be in 1.2, but I thought I’d write up a brief summary of where things stand and where we go from here.

Firstly, I’ve rewritten a fair amount of the CSS, to make it more flexible and extensible. Content areas (such as entries, comments and so on) are now denoted by the content class, while the two columns are referred to by primary and secondary classes. This replaces a large and disparate set of classes and ids, making the code cleaner and easier to extend and modify. Additional stylesheets, for example, should now be much easier to write.

Secondly, Chris has been working on the Tarski Options page, cleaning it up and improving it substantially. We hope that the new version will be easier and more intuitive to use.

There are also the usual raft of tweaks and improvements, including the much-requested pagination and next/previous links, better trackback and language support, and a new and improved loop.php file which should make modifications based on the Tarski code much easier to implement.

1.2 beta test

Because there are such substantial alterations to the code, we want to run a small test before releasing it publicly. Sign up for the 1.2 beta on this forum thread.

Beta applications are now closed.