Download Tarski 2.3

WordPress 2.6 introduced better support for a secure connection to the administrative area, which Ryan Boren covered pretty thoroughly in this article. Tarski 2.3 adds full support for this functionality, so you should now be able to save your Tarski options when using the admin area over SSL. However, due to the use of a number of new functions, WordPress 2.6 is a requirement.

A couple of minor security improvements have also been made. The Tarski options page can now only be accessed by users with the edit_themes capability. WordPress’ role system wraps around a capability-based user model, and it’s more secure to tie functionality to those capabilities than to roles which are more malleable.

As well as fixing a bug in the Links template, a number of tweaks have been made to improve Tarski’s performance and reliability. A long-standing problem with the upgrade process, where widget sidebar settings might be lost, has now been fixed. Tarski is also more reliant on WordPress’ own APIs, which should allow it to take advantage of performance and stability improvements made in the WordPress core.

In addition to this, the new navbar selector introduced in Tarski 2.2 is now fully compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and 7. There weren’t any reports of problems, presumably because Tarski users are more discriminating than the median internet citizen, but good cross-browser compatibility is a worthy goal nonetheless.

Thank you to everyone who tested the release candidates; I can only assume from the lack of responses that everything worked perfectly. Enjoy the new release.

Please post bugs and suggestions on the forum.

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.