Download Tarski 2.4

You can also get this release as a Git tag or a Subversion tag or branch.

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.

Tarski 2.3 was an extremely stable release, so while there are a lot of changes in 2.4, they’re almost all in support of new features. A lot of behind-the-scenes work to make Tarski’s code cleaner, more robust and compatible with WordPress 2.7 has taken place, but the interesting parts for most users will be the two major functionality changes to comments and the options page.

Tarski now supports the new threaded comments functionality added in WordPress 2.7. Threading and paging are both built into the WP core, and are pretty configurable from the admin panel. One can decide whether comments should be paginated, and if so, how many top-level comments should appear on each page (if threading is disabled, all comments will be top-level ones). The maximum level of nesting can be set from 1 to 10, and comment threads can be set to automatically close after a certain period of time.

The changes made to accommodate this new functionality mean that Tarski’s comments are now ‘inline’ with the main content area, and are no longer forced down by the sidebar. This decision was difficult to make; Tarski’s distinctive comments were, to my mind, one of the more elegant features of the theme and the limitations they imposed were minor compared to the benefits of better spacing and a decent content area for comments to fit into. However, given Tarski’s ability to swap columns around and the need to support RTL languages, the development and ongoing support burden would have been too much, given the vast amounts of added complexity that the new comments system brings.

Obviously the biggest user-facing change in WordPress 2.7 is the new, completely redesigned admin panel. When it became clear just how radical the changes were, I decided that despite the Tarski options page being thoroughly overhauled not too long ago in version 2.1, I had to revisit both the aesthetics and the functionality. The result is, I think, a cleaner and more effective options page which doesn’t feel out of place in the new admin area.

There have also been some changes to the way options are saved to the database: Tarski now uses the WordPress generic admin POST handler, which both leads to more modular code and bakes in a certain amount of additional security protection. Furthermore, building on the security improvements in version 2.3, the options handlers now check the referrer to protect against CSRF attacks—a type of attack that Tarski’s login and logout links are also now hardened against, thanks to Mark Jaquith’s thoughtfulness.

Tarski’s update notifier now uses the new HTTP API, which has several advantages over Tarski’s native update notifier code. To begin with, it will work across a far wider range of transports, potentially making update notifications available to many more people whose servers don’t support libcurl or fsockopen. Just as importantly, it will be supported by the core WordPress team, reducing the amount of complex and highly specialised code in Tarski. This leaves me more time to focus on Tarski’s core competencies and reduces the opportunities for bugs in the update notifier (something that has been an ongoing issue ever since it was introduced).

Thanks to those who tested the release candidates; I hope everyone enjoys using the new version.

Please post any bugs or suggestions on the forum.

In my view, the best part of this release is a vastly improved navbar selector. It’s a major improvement over the old implementation for a few reasons, firstly because it actually shows you the structure of your pages: they’re not just a big long list, but a properly indented tree that allows you to see just where in the overall structure of your site a given page fits.

Secondly, some people have a lot of pages. Until now, if that was the case, the navbar selector would utterly overwhelm the options page. Now it doesn’t have to: each sub-list is collapsible, so you can reduce the list to just what you need to see at any one time. I’ve found it a great help . Which lists are collapsed and which aren’t is saved in the database, so if you collapse a load of menus you won’t find them expanding out again next time you visit the Tarski options page.

Performance improvements have been gleaned by only loading Tarski’s library of administrative functionality when you’re actually using the WordPress admin page, not for every visitor hitting your front page. In addition to this, paginating archive and search pages is now the default, and the code that removes pagination and shows all the results for a given year, tag or search query has been reimplemented in a more optimised way that generally reduces the number of database queries required to generate the page by a significant number.

Additionally, changes in the WordPress core in version 2.6 has allowed me to deprecate a large chunk of Tarski code in favour of simpler and more elegant WordPress API calls. This makes the Tarski codebase more maintainable and also helps with performance. Removing a few unnecessary Tarski API hooks also helps with this.

Lastly, I’ve tidied up Tarski’s gallery and image support a bit so it fits in better with the gallery functionality added in WordPress 2.5 and updated in 2.6. Galleries should now be styled a little more nicely, and individual image pages are cleaner. Hope you enjoy the new version.

Support requests should go in the forum as usual.

Recently I’ve been contributing the odd patch to the WordPress core, and coupled with the many other huge improvements in WordPress 2.5, the result has been that I’ve been able to remove a few things from Tarski. The ability to choose which feed type is linked to by default, for example, has been added to WordPress, and so it’s been dropped from Tarski.

Widgets

I also decided to finally give in to the inevitable, and drop Tarski’s native sidebar implementation in favour of the widgets it’s had since version 1.1.2. If you’re using the Tarski sidebar, don’t worry: your settings will be automatically converted into widgets. If you’re using a custom sidebar file, that will be picked up too: if it’s there it’ll be used, overriding the widget sidebar, and if it isn’t, it won’t.

The main footer area is now a widget field, too, and Tarski’s recent articles code has been rewritten as a widget, so you can either keep things as they are, or start customising madly. Tarski’s hooks system has received a number of additions, so anyone building their website on top of Tarski should find it that much easier to make adjustments. Some 2.1 developer notes will be forthcoming once I find the time to finish writing them up.

Avatars & icons

After being absent for a few versions, avatars are now back, courtesy of the native WordPress implementation in 2.5. You’ll be able to see them in action by commenting on this post.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to freshen up the theme with some new icons. Obviously if you want to use them in any other GPL-compatible project then you’re free to do so.

Options page

Obviously the biggest change in WordPress 2.5 is the new admin interface, and Tarski’s options page has received a thorough overhaul too. The last time we made such a big change was in version 1.3—almost a year ago. Things have come on a fair bit since then. Enjoy the new version.

Bugs and suggestions on the forum please.

First, something I’m quite pleased with – Tarski now works right out-of-the-box with WordPress MU. The theme will now auto-detect WPMU and tweak its functioning accordingly; the specifics are in the changelog. We’ve been pleased to see networks like WordPress.com and Edublogs picking up Tarski, and we hope this makes it easier to implement.

Fans of custom header images will be happy to hear that we’ve plugged WordPress’s custom header functionality into Tarski, so you can upload new header images with ease.

In the interests of cleaning up the database a little bit, and making it easier to change options via the database and so on, we’ve combined all the various tarski_blahblahblah options into one array. An upgrade script is included and will run automatically (it’s also available in library/upgrade-to-1.4.php if you prefer, or wish to peruse). Note: The very first pageview after upgrading may have some SQL errors – just ignore them and refresh the page, they should disappear.

Most of the bug fixes are things we should have fixed ages ago, to do with the display of comments when the columns have been swapped. In all honesty it had just slipped our minds, so thank you to those of you who posted about this issue on the forum.

Other than that, there’s a small localisation issue fix (which again, several people pointed out on the forum), and a bit of footer triage: the default ‘About’ header has been removed and the blurb has moved above the recent articles listing. If you want the header back you can add it in via the Options page, but you don’t have to.

Thanks again to everyone who’s pointed out bugs and contributed translations; hope you enjoy the new release.

Point out bugs or add suggestions on the forum.

Obviously the major change is the new Tarski Options page, with an overhauled appearance as well as completely renovated markup. Functionally it’s little different, but it’s much better put together from a design perspective. Most of the help text, labels and so on were completely rewritten, so there’s a new POT file on the localisation page.

There’s also a new sidebar customisation option: those of you who like to write your own code can now make a user-sidebar.php file and tinker to your heart’s content.

Legacy version, 1.2.5

We’re actually releasing two versions today; the other one is Tarski 1.2.5, which has an even shorter changelog entry—just one item. 1.2.5 is a legacy version, intended for those who can’t (or won’t) get WordPress 2.1 or higher, which 1.3 requires. You can download it from the Legacy Versions page.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped us with Tarski; hope you enjoy the new release.

Bugs and suggestions on the forum as always.