You can also get this version as a Git tag.

We strongly recommend following the upgrade guide. Always back up your files and database before running a WordPress or Tarski upgrade. Please ensure that you upgrade WordPress before installing the new version of Tarski.

WordPress menus

Tarski 3.0 removes the built-in menu functionality in favour of the core WordPress menu feature. This means that after you install the new version of Tarski you’ll need to reconstruct your site’s navbar. Just go to Appearance > Menus in the WordPress admin panel, create a new menu, and add it to the Tarski navbar.

Header images

Headers are also now selected entirely outside the theme. Tarski registers all its current headers as default headers which you can select from the Appearance > Header page in the WordPress admin panel, so if you were using one of the built-in headers, or had added your own to the /headers directory in Tarski or a child theme, you will need to re-select it from there. If you were using a custom header you had uploaded yourself, you don’t need to change anything.

Please post bug reports, suggestions etc. in the comments or email me.

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.

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.

New Features

Martin kindly did another header for this release, Thought Wind.

We’ve added another variant style, skyline.css. It’s very much in the same vein as the other styles, but for the official styles and headers I want to create a sense of variations on a theme, rather than radically different looks (you can always make your own if you want to do something completely different, after all).

There’s now also an option to swap the columns, with the sidebar appearing on the right and the content on the left. All the other columnated sections—navigation, comments, the footer—swap over as well if you choose this option. You can find it under ‘Miscellaneous Options’ at the bottom of the Tarski Options page (Presentation > Tarski Options in the WP admin panel, as always).

Chris has also done some excellent work revising the navigation bar. It now gets its links from the list of top-level pages—and you can choose which ones you want to appear. This option too appears on the Tarski Options page. Another advantage of doing it like this is that the links are no longer hardcoded; if you don’t have URL rewriting enabled, or have a different set of page slugs to ours, the links will still find your pages.

This change to the navigation bar does require you to select your desired pages in the Tarski Options page—don’t panic if there’s suddenly only a “Home” link after updating!

Tweaks

None of the tweaks will change anything major about Tarski—they just add a level of polish which was previously missing. Feed links now find your correct feed addresses, rather than just linking to /feed/; titles that are longer than one line of text will space themselves properly; various bits of “under the hood” code have been cleaned up or streamlined.

Just one note: the page.php file is now redundant, so make sure you delete it when you upgrade Tarski.

If you use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, you’ll be glad to hear that Tarski now includes complete support for its features: we’ve added the option to activate the live tag search feature on the tags page. The plugin does a pretty terrible job of separating content and presentation from behaviour, so the way it operates and displays isn’t as elegant as I’d like. C’est la vie.

As always, post any bugs or problems you have in the comments. We really appreciate your response; it makes the job worthwhile.

This release has a number of major changes. If you’re upgrading from an older Tarski install, we recommend deleting the entire contents of the old folder and installing a fresh copy of 1.1.

New Header

Ben did a new header, Coffee Rings, and we’ve added a blank header image for those who prefer a minimal look.

Theme Hooks

One of the biggest problems people seem to run into with Tarski and other themes is the necessity of editing theme files to add content to areas of the theme. This causes upgrades to be a substantial pain in the ass for users, as well as making support more difficult for theme authors.

We’re trying out a solution to this problem with Tarski’s new theme hooks. Using a single file, constants.php, code can be added to the theme without losing it when updating to the next version. Take a look at the documentation for more information.

As an example of this, our Mint stats tracker JavaScript for this site is added via the headerInclude hook.

Alternate Styles

Having seen some of the nifty tweaks to the theme, we figured it was time to make tweaking the CSS easier. The options pane now supports alternate styles, which can be used to tweak and override the default stylesheet. For example, this site is now running the polar.css style.

Tarski now ships with several alternate styles, and you can make your own by just uploading them to wp-content/themes/tarski/styles/. Got a nifty alternate style? Please do share yours with us – we may include it in the next version!

Asides

We’ve added an implementation of Matt’s Asides that draws on K2′s implementation as well. Just select a post category in your theme options and away you go.