19th Jul 2008

The State of the Art

WordPress 2.6 is the kind of release I’d like to see the WordPress team doing more often. It contains some clever stuff, like post revisions, along with a load of bug fixes, and it didn’t take too long to develop. In the past WordPress has taken far too long between releases; a reasonably quick turnaround and a predictable release schedule make life a lot easier for those of us writing code that depends on the core.

Matt was kind enough to mention me in the release notes, but in truth I hardly did anything. These days I seem to be so busy that keeping my own projects up to date is proving beyond me, let alone contributing to things like WordPress. Finally pushing Tarski 2.2 out of the door was stressful enough to put me off continuing its development. I suspect that from this point on it’s going to enter maintenance mode, hopefully keeping pace with WordPress development in terms of feature support, but no more.

I had the pleasure of road-testing the new theme directory that Joseph Scott has put so much hard work into. I’m not sure yet how the API is going to work, but I imagine we’ll see update notices and one-click upgrades just like those for plugins. This will mean I’ll be able to drop Tarski’s own update mechanism, which will make the core code a little bit leaner and remove what’s proved to be an ongoing headache, despite the hard work of those who’ve helped me debug the various problems it’s had. You can grab Tarski from the theme directory.

In all honesty, developing in PHP with Subversion as my version control system is starting to feel very tedious. Fiddling with some WordPress hooks earlier today, I pondered how much easier it would be to do simple things if PHP had first-class functions. You could do something like this:

add_filter('the_content', function($content) {
  return '<div class="content">' . $content . '</div>';
});

Which, of course, looks a lot more like JavaScript than PHP, but despite the bad parts I’d much rather write JavaScript than PHP—and, lately, have been.

, , , ,

5 responses

I always find myself amazed with Tarski. You’ve done a great job with the theme making it easy to use, easy to customize and looking great!
Not to mention the great support!

The options page and hooks makes it seem years ahead of most other themes. Tarski is good example of how themes should work..

Been using it on my site for two years and nerver considered changing to any other theme. I hope you’ll find the time and motivation to keep making it such a great theme.

~ Mikael

@ Mikael - I agree completely! I just installed this them a few days ago, and it’s the best I’ve used by far. (disclosure - 2 years using wordpress, and I’m a perfectionist but NOT a programmer - I don’t know how to manipulate php code/files..)

@ Benedict - PLEASE keep setting the bar high, so that others might follow. And if you ever decide to release a 3-column version of Tarski, let me know.

Best Regards, Chris B.

~ Chris Butterworth

Thanks for the kind words, both of you. So much of the time I just see the bugs, the horrible old code, the plugin incompatibilities, the eternal feature requests—the many ways in which it’s not what people want. It can get a little disheartening, especially when dealing with intransigent bugs that persist across numerous attempts to fix them.

Mikael, I particularly appreciate your prompt bug reports. I’m sure a lot of people’s experiences with Tarski have been vastly improved by dint of your diligence, and I know I’ve been able to cover up numerous embarrassing mistakes very quickly because of them.

~ Benedict

Ben,

I just wanted to echo some of the same sentiments Chris & Mikael expressed.

I, too, feel that Tarski is far above the other themes I’ve encountered. I love its flexibility, design, and options - which have often made it easy to achieve functions lacking from WordPress itself (and freed me from the compulsion to code a new theme for myself - a project which I simply don’t have time for.)

Since I discovered your theme, I’ve had no desire or intention of changing to another. I’m impressed & grateful for all your work, including the exceptional support you provide for this theme.

I hope you will continue to find the energy & motivation for this project; and I hope that it rewards you. You do set the bar high!

(By the way, I would also be *very* interested in a 3-column version of Tarski.)

Thanks for all your hard work.

- blue-green

~ blue-green

I’m new to Wordpress, but I’ve looked long and hard at available themes, and as far as I can tell Tarski is among the very best. Everyone sings it’s technical praises - for good reason. But the fact is that it also is visually quite appealing. A theme that has one but on the other is of no value. Tarski excels in both areas IMO. As such, it is the only theme I’ve used.

But I do have to echo the prior sentiment, a 3-column version is the one thing that - for me - would just put this theme over the top.

But even in 2-column, I love it. Thanks a ‘mil!

Steve

~ scolley

Respond?