WordPress 2.4 has been cancelled, and we’ll be going straight to 2.5 in early March. Tarski 2.1 is being written for compatibility with that next version, and hence will be delayed until then too. Keep track of our plans for the release on the roadmap page (which has just moved from the ‘Help’ section to the ‘About’ section).

The major feature of Tarski 2.1 thus far is the move to entirely widgetised footers and sidebars. I’m in the midst of writing and testing an upgrade script to convert people’s current options to the new widget-based ones. If you have any comments or suggestions about that, please post on the forum. Patches, bug reports etc. should be posted on the issue tracker ticket for the changes.

I’ve updated the website with a link to the Tarski Subversion repository, specifically to the latest stable branch (which is what you should be using; 2.0.5 is the latest release from that branch). Hopefully more people will try using svn to keep their WordPress and Tarski installations updated; it’s a little more work initially, but it makes maintenance far, far easier, as well as allowing you to take advantage of the latest security fixes, general bug fixes, and other improvements with the minimum of effort. There are a bunch of tutorials out there on this subject (for example, this one). If people are interested I can write up a quick tutorial on how I keep things up to date on this site.

• Bosnian
• German
• Spanish
• Bahasa Indonesian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Danish

If you’ve done a previous translation for Tarski, I’d be very grateful if you could update it for the new version. If you haven’t, and you’re able to translate Tarski into a language missing from the list, why not have a go? All translations, both new and updated, should be posted on the forum. Cheers!

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.

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.

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.

We’ve decided to release translations separately, in a zip file which we’ll update each time we receive a new or updated translation.

To use a particular translation, just extract the zip file and move the file you want to use into the root Tarski directory.

The list of translations included in the file will be kept, as before, on the localisation page, along with the download link above. If you create a new translation for Tarski, please post it on the forum.

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.