WordPress

I’ve switched themes to Tarski, not because I was having any theme problems, but because I felt like a change of scenery round here, and I thought that this photo from my recent week at the beach would make a good custom header background. I cropped it, and added text to it, with Picnik. The font in header is Ariel, which while not ideal was the most suitable of the fonts available in the basic version of Picnik.

Reasons for choosing Tarski (from among the thousands of themes available for WordPress these days) include: it’s clean; it’s well documented; it’s kept up to date, and indeed the version I’m using was released a couple of days ago for compatibility with WordPress 2.6; it has all the features I was looking for, such as widgets; it’s available at WordPress.com, so if I get to like it enough I could switch my main blog to it.

There are a few ways in which I think that Tarski could be even better. For example, I don’t like the way it displays tags separate from other post metadata. I’m not sure that I like the navbar, but I don’t see a way to disable it; on the other hand, maybe it’s such a basic feature of the theme that if you don’t like it, you should find another theme, or be willing to do your own Tarski-hacking. Oh yes, and there was some widget-related weirdness when I switched to Tarski. But I’m glad that I did switch.

I’ve upgraded this test blog to the recently-released WordPress 2.6. I went from 2.3.something. What happened to 2.4 and 2.5? WordPress skipped the first of these, in that they went right to 2.5, and I skipped the second, in that I never installed 2.5.

The upgrade to 2.6 went smoothly. If there were problems, I’ve yet to find them. I’ve already tried some of the new features, in that they are already at WordPress.com, where my main blog lives.

So now, it’s time to mess around with themes, plugins, etc.

I just upgraded this test blog to the current version of WordPress: 2.3.2.

At the same time I attempted to upgrade my Habari test blog to 0.3.3, with rather less success. After doing what I thought was the upgrade, trying to access the blog gave me: “Controller Object ( [base_url] => /cheza/ [stub:private] => [action:private] => [handler:private] => ) Unmatched rule: 1″. I’m probably missing something very simple, but don’t have time to chase it now.

I just installed the release (as opposed to the beta) of WordPress 2.3 for this blog. WordPress.com, and hence my main blog, is running much the same code.

I previously posted that 2.3 is, among other things, the tags release of WordPress. I remarked that themes need to become tag-aware. Apparently all that takes is insertion of a new template tag, the_tags, at the appropriate point(s).

For Skimmed Milk, that’s the function skimmed_milk_post_meta, which is in functions.php. I’ve just realized that the_tags also needs to be in single.php. Or maybe single.php just needs to call skimmed_milk_post_meta, rather than doing its own post_meta stuff.

I’ve just updated WordPress to the first beta of 2.3. I had some trouble with cPanel, which still seems rather unintuitive to me, but seem to have arrived in 2.3 territory. The main attraction of 2.3 for me is tags, so I’ll apply some of them to this post.

Update: the post is tagged with beta and tag, but how do the tags show up? I guess that a tag-aware theme would help, and that I’m not using one.