2.7 Release

August 1, 2010 by Ben Eastaugh | No comments

Tarski 2.7 adds compatibility with many WordPress 3.0 features, including custom backgrounds. A detailed list of changes is available in the changelog. Please note that WordPress 3.0 is required for this release.

Download Tarski 2.7.1

You can also get this version as a Git tag.

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.

Overriding templates

Child themes can now override many of Tarski’s built-in template fragments. Simply create a file of the appropriate name in the app/templates directory of your child theme (you’ll have to create this) and add a file of the appropriate name—Tarski will use it automatically. For example, you could replace the template Tarski displays when there are no posts by adding a no_posts.php file.

Compressed assets

There are also some client-side performance improvements: the theme’s graphics are slightly better compressed, and minified versions of Tarski’s CSS and JavaScript are served by default. The full stylesheets and JS files are of course included with the theme download, so there’s nothing stopping you changing them and then re-minifying (although I would in general recommend using a custom stylesheet or child theme rather than making changes to the theme directly, as this will hamper your ability to upgrade it).

This release also contains numerous small improvements and bug fixes. There are a lot of WordPress 3.0 releases I just didn’t have time to add support for, but hopefully those can be added before too long. If anyone would like to contribute those changes, please take a look at the outstanding issues and fork the project on GitHub. Hope you enjoy the new version.

Please post bug reports, suggestions etc. on the forum.

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New translations repository

May 23, 2010 by Ben Eastaugh | 3 comments

I have finally got round to transferring all existing Tarski translations to a new, separate translations repository on GitHub. Thanks for your patience; I know the current situation has been unsatisfactory for a long time.

I am looking for a maintainer for this repository: someone who can generate the POT file for new versions of Tarski, and upload new translations when people make them.

One thing that I think would improve things a lot for users would be a simpler way of downloading individual translation files, without having to do an extensive search through the repository. I’m open to suggestions as to how this might be accomplished.

Translations for Tarski 2.6

So far I’ve received three updated translations for Tarski 2.6: German, Bulgarian and Formal Spanish. Thanks to Andreas Beer, Vesselin Petkov and Eduardo Larequi for providing those.

We also now have a translation into Belorussian from Marcis G. Special thanks to him for badgering me until I got round to sorting all of this out.

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I’ve just uploaded a POT file for Tarski 2.6, to make translating the latest version of Tarski easier. Translations are currently still in our old Subversion repository on Google Code; I want to move them to GitHub and make it easier for people to download and work with them, but that requires some time I haven’t got right now. If anyone wants to volunteer to help out with this, let me know.

Download Tarski 2.6 POT file

April 2, 2010 by Ben Eastaugh | 4 comments

I’ve just finished uploading all the old versions of Tarski—47 of them!—to GitHub, so if you ever need an old version, you can get it from the Tarski release archive.

The only one that seems to be missing is 1.0, so if anyone happens to have a copy kicking around, do let me know.

March 7, 2010 by Ben Eastaugh | No comments

If you want to make a child theme for Tarski, perhaps taking advantage of the new functionality added in Tarski 2.6, I’ve put together a few lines of code that you can start with.

The important thing that this code does is use the main Tarski stylesheet as well as the child theme’s stylesheet, so you don’t need to copy that over.

January 19, 2010 by Ben Eastaugh | 5 comments

2.6 Release

January 16, 2010 by Ben Eastaugh | 15 comments

Tarski 2.6 brings support for new WordPress features, improves the API, and makes the theme far more amenable to customisation via child themes. A detailed list of changes is available in the changelog. Please note that WordPress 2.9 is required for this release.

Download Tarski 2.6

You can also get this version as a Git tag.

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.

Better child themes

Child themes can now support their own custom headers and stylesheets. Simply create your child theme and add your new header images to the headers/ directory in the child theme, rather than in your version of Tarski. The same applies to custom stylesheets. This makes Tarski child themes far more powerful, and allows you to keep all your Tarski customisations in a child theme rather than having to worry about backing up files stored in your Tarski directory as well.

Post thumbnails & image captions

Tarski now supports the post thumbnails added in WordPress 2.9, as well as properly styling the captions added to images in WordPress 2.6.

More customisable navbar

For those of you using the Tarski API to modify the navbar, a couple of enhancements have been added. Firstly, the ‘Home’ and page links are now added to the navbar via the tarski_navbar filter, making it much easier to remove them if need be. Secondly, page and external links added to the navbar now have more meaningful array keys when they are passed to that filter, making them easier to manipulate programmatically.

Now in HTML5

HTML5 is the future of HTML, and using the HTML5 DOCTYPE in Tarski will make it easier to incorporate powerful new features in the future. There was a discussion of where this will lead in the comments on the 2.6 release candidates post.

As usual, there are many more tweaks, bug fixes and new features in Tarski 2.6 than I can go into here. Hope you enjoy the new version.

Please post bug reports, suggestions etc. on the forum.

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2.6 Release Candidate 2

December 21, 2009 by Ben Eastaugh | 13 comments

With WordPress 2.9 out of the door, I figured it was time to get the ball rolling on the latest Tarski release. There are some fairly extensive improvements to some areas of the internals, so I would very much appreciate some testing before I release the final version.

Highlights of the changes include drawing header images and alternate styles from child themes, support for the new post thumbnails, and a switch to the HTML5 DOCTYPE.

If you test it, can you send me the string of your tarski_options option both before and after the upgrade? You can get it from your database by running the following SQL query on the database where WordPress is installed.

SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'tarski_options';

Thanks!

Update

Found some bugs in the upgrade routine already. RC2 is now out, use that instead.

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Designate 1.2

October 27, 2009 by Ben Eastaugh | 1 comment

I’ve just released version 1.2 of my Designate plugin for WordPress. Designate allows you to specify individual custom stylesheets for every post and page on your site.

The new version cleans up the code a bit, and comes with far better documentation in the form of a README file and improved inline documentation. You can download it from here.

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2.5 Release

August 6, 2009 by Ben Eastaugh | 16 comments

Tarski 2.5 improves Tarski’s compatibility with WordPress 2.8 and takes advantage of its new features to produce a leaner codebase. An excruciating amount of detail is available in the changelog. Please note that WordPress 2.8 is required for this release.

Download Tarski 2.5

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.

Fixes & enhancements

Tarski 2.5 fixes a number of bugs, most of which were very minor. Its widget code has been extensively overhauled to meet the new standard interfaces introduced in WordPress 2.8.

The Recent Articles widget has been almost completely rewritten. Not only can it now be used in multiple widget areas, but the title it displays and the number of articles listed are now customisable.

Support for right-to-left languages has improved again, thanks to mark-k on the forum. I hope to build on this for 2.6 and improve the way the options page displays for RTL language users as well.

In the spirit of progressive enhancement, users with more recent browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Chrome will hopefully notice the improved styling of form submit buttons.

Deprecations and diminishment

As many of you noticed, this release has taken a lot longer than usual to come out. This wasn’t because it was an especially complex release (it wasn’t; despite the length of the changelog, the changes in 2.4 were much more substantial), but because I no longer have as much time as I once did to work on Tarski.

As a result, I’m rethinking how I approach the upkeep of the theme. I’d rather spend my time as a programmer than a janitor, so the changes I’m making ought to ensure that Tarski continues to be updated with each new version of WordPress, while eliminating a few of the headaches that have built up over the years.

No more default widgets

In the last version, I added a set of default widgets to Tarski’s widget areas. This was, I thought, a nice piece of functionality; the only problem was that it relied too much on private WordPress internals, rather than the public API. Unsurprisingly, the internals changed (for the better—these changes were at the heart of the improved widget support), and my code no longer worked.

Rather than rewrite it, with the possibility of it breaking with the next WordPress release, I’ve removed it altogether. If a new, approved, public way is added to allow this functionality then I’ll reinstate the defaults, but until then, new users will just have to put up with things looking a bit bare until they add their widget selections.

User sidebar file deprecated

Because widgets are now settled as the way to customise WordPress sites, I’ve deprecated the user-sidebar.php file. Support for it will be removed entirely in Tarski 2.6.

Constants file deprecated

Considered a legacy API since the introduction Tarski’s extensive hooks API (a far superior way to extend the theme), the constants file is now deprecated entirely. Support for it will be removed in Tarski 2.6.

Subversion repository no longer maintained

Tarski 2.5 will also be the last release available from the Subversion repository. Again, I have a limited amount of time, and I’d prefer to spend any time I do have to work on Tarski writing code, rather than keeping two version control repositories in sync. Anyone wanting to maintain a public Subversion repository is, of course, entirely welcome to do so.

Support forum hanging on, for now

The forum is probably the most time-consuming thing of all. I’m not planning on shutting it altogether, but my activity there will drop a bit further. Tarski is an exceptionally well-documented theme, and there are literally hundreds of forum discussions covering a vast number of user questions. For those who want to make changes, there is example code in abundance.

As always, hope you enjoy the new version.

Please post bug reports and suggestions on the forum.

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Excerpt Plugins

August 4, 2009 by Ben Eastaugh

In response to a forum thread, I threw together a couple of plugins yesterday.

The first one is Display Excerpts, and it adds posts excerpts (should they exist) to the beginning of each post’s content area. The second is Only Excerpts, and it replaces posts on home and archive pages with their respective excerpts. The full post can be viewed at its permalink.

Both are also listed as example plugins.

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