Tarski is designed to be easy to use and highly extensible. Many simple changes can be made without the usual recourse of altering files, via the Tarski Options page.
This page explains how to install and update Tarski, make basic changes via the Options page, add new header images and alternate styles, and offers links to more advanced documentation for trickier tasks.
If your question isn’t answered anywhere in the documentation, or you’ve run into a bug or problem with the theme, please post on the support forum.
Installing and updating Tarski
Setting up Tarski should be relatively painless. Once you have downloaded and extracted the Tarski files, upload the tarski directory to your wp-content/themes/ directory.
Next, activate Tarski via the ‘Presentation’ tab of your Wordpress administration pages. This will add a ‘Tarski Options’ link in the navigation bar.
To update Tarski to the latest version, follow the instructions on the updates page.
Basic changes via the Options page
Everything on the Options page should be fairly self-explanatory. At the top, you can turn update notification on and off (we recommend leaving it on), and change the content of the footer.
Next, you can configure your sidebar. Select the type of sidebar you want to use, and then configure that specific option as appropriate.
There are plenty more options further down the page: you can change your header image, disable the title, select an alternate style, and add pages to the navbar. Once you’ve made your changes, hit ‘Save Options’ to save and activate your changes. When you go to look at your site, those changes will have been made.
Intermediate changes
Adding headers
Tarski comes with several stock header images. You’re free to use any of them, but you may prefer to add your own.
Adding your own header is simple. All header images (and their respective thumbnails) are placed in wp-content/themes/tarski/headers/. Thumbnails should be 150×150 pixels in size, and have the same file extension as the full sized image they illustrate. Their filename should be the same as the full sized image, with the addition of -thumb before the extension. So if your header image is called example.jpg, your thumbnail image should be named example-thumb.jpg.
We welcome submissions of additional header images, providing you are willing to release them under Tarski’s GPL license. If you’d like to contribute a header to the next release of Tarski, please post on the forum.
Adding custom styles
Tarski comes with three alternate styles, which tweak the theme’s colours slightly. You can also add your own custom styles, which can make more radical changes to the way the theme displays. Read all about this on the alternate styles page.
Adding a translation
Tarski has quite a number of translations available already, and these are easy to install: just download the one you want to use, and upload it into your Tarski directory. If there’s no Tarski translation available in your language, why not write your own and post it on the forum, so other people can use it too?
Advanced changes
More advanced changes will be most likely made by writing a plugin to interface with Tarski’s theme hooks system. This is just an extension of WordPress’s own set of hooks, and as such should be familiar to anyone who’s written WordPress plugins before. The hooks reference contains a list of Tarski’s action and filters, and is constantly updated as new versions come out.
We advise against customising Tarski by modifying the core theme files, as this will make it much harder for you to take advantage of Tarski’s regular updates and improvements. Tarski is highly extensible and we recommend you take advantage of that extensibility rather than making changes to the core theme files.