We’ve just added a new, revised version of our original alternate styles tutorial. The new Alternate Styles page resides in its rightful place in the Docs & Help section, and has been substantially rewritten for greater clarity and to correct a couple of errors. The original article is now defunct, so if you have any links pointing there please update them.
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The roadmap has been updated to give a more accurate and complete picture of what’s going to be in 1.2, but I thought I’d write up a brief summary of where things stand and where we go from here.
Firstly, I’ve rewritten a fair amount of the CSS, to make it more flexible and extensible. Content areas (such as entries, comments and so on) are now denoted by the content class, while the two columns are referred to by primary and secondary classes. This replaces a large and disparate set of classes and ids, making the code cleaner and easier to extend and modify. Additional stylesheets, for example, should now be much easier to write.
Secondly, Chris has been working on the Tarski Options page, cleaning it up and improving it substantially. We hope that the new version will be easier and more intuitive to use.
There are also the usual raft of tweaks and improvements, including the much-requested pagination and next/previous links, better trackback and language support, and a new and improved loop.php file which should make modifications based on the Tarski code much easier to implement.
1.2 beta test
Because there are such substantial alterations to the code, we want to run a small test before releasing it publicly. Sign up for the 1.2 beta on this forum thread.
Beta applications are now closed.
Tags: 1.2, beta test, customisability, features, forum, modifications, roadmap, theme hooks, themes, tweaks
As promised, here’s the new version. The changelog has all the details. My major aim with this theme was to smooth out the widget implementation slightly, add a couple of options people had requested, and improve the look and feel of the them.
New Features
We’ve expanded your options again with a new header, the imaginatively-titled Spots. If you go to the Tarski Options page and scroll down to the Miscellaneous Options, you’ll see the option to display your site’s tagline or description below the title.
If you don’t have a site description, don’t worry, there won’t be a huge and annoying gap between header and navigation.
Tweaks
This is mostly pretty dull stuff: some minor adjustments, rewriting a bit of CSS for the widgets plugin and whatnot.
The most obvious thing is probably the reworked Asides; I think they’re a lot more elegant like this, and these are fewer lines breaking up the flow of the page, which is how I originally envisioned things.
I’m going to do a more major rewrite of the code for the next major version, including a standardisation of the code for content areas and columns. This means two things in practice: some of your alternate styles will need rewriting, but it should be much easier to write them in future.
Tarski has a fair bit of legacy code and is much like a city that has had new buildings plonked down on old streets—it’s not broken as such, but future town planning will be a lot easier once we rip out some old foundations.
Keep an eye on the roadmap for the lowdown on the changes as I start to work on them.
Tags: 1.1.3, download, features, release, tagline, tweaks, widgets
It’s definately evolution rather than revolution with this release. After we launched 1.1 I started tweaking, playing around with various niggles that were bothering me about the theme. You can go through all the details in the changelog.
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.
Tags: 1.1.1, alternate styles, download, features, headers, tags, tweaks