WordPress

I’m very happy to have just uploaded Adam Klimowski’s translation of Tarski into Polish—the language of this theme’s namesake, Alfred Tarski. You can download it from our translations repository. Many thanks to Adam for that, as well as everyone else who’s provided a translation, all of whom are credited on the localisation page.

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.

Tarski 1.3 doesn’t have the longest changelog in the world, but don’t let that deceive you; there are some substantial changes.

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.

Bugs bother us, so when they’re brought to our attention, we do our best to fix them. Tarski 1.2.3 is mostly a bug-fixing release, but I’m happy to say it comes with some new features too, albeit not of our making: two new translations, into French by Matthieu Mauduit and into Danish by Henrik Buchwald. Many thanks to both of them for their hard work.

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.

Tarski 1.2.2 contains numerous bug fixes and tweaks to improve both Tarski’s stability and its flexibility.

The changelog has all the gory details, but here’s a brief run-down of the changes. Firstly, our wonderful translation team has expanded the scope of the Swedish, Dutch and German translations currently available to cover the Tarski Options page and a few other bits of text which were missed or omitted (by me, not them) during the initial localisation work.

As always we discovered our own needs exceeded what the software was capable of, so we’ve added several more theme hooks to allow the insertion of text or objects (adverts, for example) at the end of posts and pages, as well as the ability for you to write custom 404 error messages. Instead of just linking back to your front page you could link visitors to your archives or tag page, or include a search field.

This release should also be compatible with WordPress 2.1: we’ve updated various things like links listings and the navbar code to make them work with the new functions and database schema present in 2.1. If you find any incompatibilities between this release and WordPress 2.1, or that we’ve broken anything in WP 2.0.x, please let us know so we can get a patch out quickly!

Lastly, we’ve fixed a number of bugs and tidied up the code in various places. A number of little scripts have been made into functions and can now be found in functions.php, which leaves the markup skeleton a lot tidier and easier to read and amend.

Many thanks to all our contributors, especially our tireless translation team, and I hope you enjoy using Tarski 1.2.2.

Please post any bugs or suggestions on the forum.