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.

I’ve just updated the code again to make it compatible with WordPress 2.1. Let me know if there are any issues.

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.

As always, let us know if you run into any problems using the theme.

Image classes

Image classes should allow you to include images in a reasonably elegant fashion, without having to write your own additional styling code. Admittedly using image classes does require adding a smidgen of code when you post an image, but it’s very minor, and should make your pictures look as good as your words.

Widgets

Widgets are basically drag-and-drop code blocks that let you include various things like text, blogrolls, feeds and so on in areas of blog pages set up to allow them. There’s some documentation on using them with Tarski here.

Currently you can only add them to your sidebar, but we plan to overhaul various bits of the rest of the theme to allow them to be added (or removed) in other places, such as the footer. Chris didn’t think much of the default links widget, so he made a new one.

Miscellany

A rudimentary print stylesheet has been added, so if you print out a page from a blog using Tarski, it should be a bit more readable than previously. The print stylesheet eliminates all the redundant page data like the header, the sidebar and the footer, leaving just the important bit—the content. Additionally, per a user request, you can now enable comments for pages should you wish.