The DokuWiki Taratasy Template offers a rather nice design, which i wanted to use for my new Wiki. This Wiki will be based upon the currently stable DokuWiki 2015-08-10a (aka “Detritus”) release. The Taratasy templates site currently shows the compatibility to the DokuWiki “Detritus” release as “unknown”, see the following screenshot:

Installing the Taratasy templates in an otherwise working DokuWiki 2015-08-10a instance lead to the rather broken appearance shown in the following example screenshot:

The colors and fonts are way off, the navigation bar at the head and bottom of the page as well as the tools menu are broken. Thus, my immediate suspicion for the root cause of the issues was in the direction of the CSS definitions provided by the Taratasy template.

Digging through the webserver and PHP logs as well as double checking the webservers rewrite rules showed no noticable indication of a problem with the DokuWiki instance itself. Switching to another template like e.g. Arctic also showed that the DokuWiki 2015-08-10a instance itself worked flawlessly. So this was not a general issue with my setup of the current DokuWiki release. The other way around, using the Taratasy template with an older DokuWiki 2014-09-29d (aka “Hrun”) release, also worked as expected and without any issues. So the problem was narrowed down to some change introduced between those two DokuWiki releases.

With the suspicion about the CSS definitions mentioned above, i tried to make some changes in the Taratasy templates style.ini file. Those changes immediately effected the layout of the re-rendered page. On the other hand, making some changes in the Taratasy templates style.local.ini file had no effect on the subsequently re-rendered page.

Browsing the commit history of the DokuWiki GitHub repository for the 2015-08-10a release and searching for commits with a reference to style.local.ini, i stubled upon the commit 656e584. The associated changes finally removed a feature which had already been marked as deprecated in previous DokuWiki releases. This feature was to include user defined CSS formatting definitions through the file style.local.ini in a templates main directory and merge these definitions with the ones from the templates style.ini file into the final CSS definitions. For several DokuWiki releases the user defined CSS formatting definitions are now supposed to be placed in the file DOKU_CONF.“tpl/$tpl/style.ini” instead.

With the source of the issue now known, my quick'n'dirty solution was to merge the CSS definitions from the templates style.local.ini into the templates style.ini and afterwards drop the now redundant style.local.ini. This was just easier to accomplish given my particular DokuWiki directory setup. Another solution would have been to create a directory DOKU_CONF/tpl/taratasy/ and move the style.local.ini into it as DOKU_CONF/tpl/taratasy/style.ini.

The modified template sources can be found in my Taratasy repository on GitHub

In conclusion, the following image shows an example screenshot of the same DokuWiki 2015-08-10a instance as above after the patch to the Taratasy template has been applied:

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