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.

However, the most major features are the bugs fixed. To begin with, the navbar now reorders correctly, and no longer needs to save that order when pages are saved; more efficient and better-written code makes it all happen dynamically.

A problem with Tarski’s options saving and updating code was exposed by the new multiple authors checking instituted in 2.0.3, with the result that the save-and-restore no longer worked properly: restoring one’s options after deleting them would merely save the defaults to the database. The underlying issues have now been fixed.

On the new features front is one I know I’ll appreciate as I continue to improve Tarski: the code behind the version check is now a lot smarter. It used to just check whether the version grabbed from the stylesheet and the one in the database—now it can tell whether any given version is newer or older than the installed version, which lets us do things like show a notice on the Dashboard notifying the user that they’re using a development version.

Lastly, I appropriated some WordPress widget code to rewrite the recent articles section, with the result that it’s now added via an action hook, th_fmain, and can consequently be removed by a plugin as well as through the Options page. The recent articles’ excerpts also have WordPress’ excerpt filters applied to them too, so any plugin which adds or removes those filters will now work as expected on Tarski’s excerpts.

Enjoy the new version; all being well, it’ll be the last before Tarski 2.1, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it.

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.

The new version includes a raft of changes. Taking a look under the hood one might be tempted to say that it’s an entirely new theme, but the experience should remain largely the same, both for admins and users.

Tarski’s options code has been rewritten from the ground up, making all sorts of new features possible. You can now select different widgets for posts and pages than are displayed on the rest of the site. It’s also possible to delete Tarski’s options entirely; however, they’ll remain in the database for another two hours, so if you delete your options by accident, you’ll be able to restore them within that window.

People shouldn’t have to learn PHP in order to use WordPress, or Tarski, but until now a modicum of technical know-how was required in order to add links (other than WordPress pages) to Tarski’s navbar. Now you can simply designate one of your blogroll links categories, and all the links in that category will be appended to your Tarski navbar.

Several people in the forum wanted tags to display everywhere, not just on single post pages, so we’ve added an option for that to the Tarski Options pages. The same goes for reversing the order of the title: now you can have the title of a post appear before the name of your site, just by ticking a box on the Options page. Finally, you can choose to link to either Atom or RSS feeds.

WordPress has automatically generated both types for quite a while now, but Tarski hasn’t linked to them—an oversight I’m very happy to have corrected. In addition to the site feed, the following page types now have automatically generated feed link elements in the document head: category archives; tag archives; day, month and year archives; and finally, searches.

Another request was for Microformat support. A couple of things made it into Tarski 1.6, but Tarski 2 brings hCard to posts and comments, and hAtom to posts.

Tagging also gets a boost with proper support for tag intersections and unions. Templating functions for this kind of thing aren’t even in the WordPress core yet, and it’s nice to be ahead of the curve for once. To see it in action, go and have a look at what’s tagged with bugs or features, or bugs and features. Before Tarski 2, all you’d get is the first tag’s name in the title. Now the title lists all the tags, and whether it’s an intersection (and) or a union (or).

With all the rewritten code comes a new structure: the files in Tarski’s library directory have been completely reorganised. Included code libraries (right now, just the Feedparser library which does the heavy lifting for Tarski’s version checking mechanism) go into library/includes, while PHP classes (and supplementary functions) go into library/classes (right now it’s just the Version and Options classes).

All Tarski’s CSS files, apart from style.css and the alternate styles, go into library/css, while JavaScript files are in library/js. Finally, Tarski’s large functions library has ended up in library/helpers. This new structure makes development easier, since it’s easier for me to remember where everything is, and it cleans up a lot of horrible, messy code that had been hanging around (in many cases) since the first release of Tarski, back in March 2006.

We’ve come quite a way since then, and I’d just like to take a moment to thank everyone who’s helped along the way. People who’ve suggested ideas and reported bugs in the forum; people who’ve helped test Tarski; people who’ve provided code, or artwork, or a critical eye. Jordan Liggitt in particular deserves a lot of gratitude for his hard work on this release. He’s helped make Tarski easier to translate; written a migration routine to carry your options over into the new system; caught various bugs in the new code; and contributed a number of thoughtful suggestions on safeguarding against CSS namespace corruption and improving Tarski’s sidebar options.

Again, thanks to everyone who’s contributed to Tarski in some way, and I hope you enjoy using the new version.

Bugs and suggestions should be posted, as always, on the forum.