Fauna Beta 1
Fauna theme for Wordpress Beta 1 is the first public release of this theme. Visitors of Noscope should not be surprised at the looks, since it’s essentially the same theme.
For a Beta 1 it’s almost feature-complete and it’s as stable and bug-free as it can be when only one person tests it.
I won’t get time to finish it in the near future and I won’t get any time to respond to any Fauna-related questions at all, but please leave a comment right here and I’ll get to it eventually.
A known issue is the author page, which is incomplete. Take a look at my author page, for instance. I would like a clever way to show instant messaging handles to people and not search-engines, but not quite sure how to do this. I would also like a contact form that allows people to contact the author — that is, a contact form that grabs the email address from the Wordpress database. If you feel up to this challenge, go right ahead and hack it in and send it my way thanks.
Have fun with the theme, and be nice.
Update: It seems the server choked on traffic last night. I’ve installed Staticize Reloaded to smoothen things. Also, a few comments got caught in moderation. I’ve now installed Akismet instead of requiring people to be pre-approved.
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This just off the wire - it’s an all-out, drag-down fight for the best theme for WordPress: K2 vs. Fauna, no holds barred! :)
Seriously, just when I thought I was going to settle with one base theme and modify it, you go and do a wonderful thing like this. :P Now I’ve got to compare things and see which works better. Looks great thus far, however! Thanks a ton!
Nice. I’ve implemented Fauna with some small changes on my site, but want to mess with the header image. Any chance of a .psd or similar?
Thanks!
Well, I’d prefer it’s not a fight, for the reasons mentioned on my main site:
Steve,
I knew I had forgotten something. Yes of course. I’ll get on it when I get home from work.
Joen, the .psd would be awesome, thanks!
Any chance of the “Nocturnal” theme being available too?
Steve,
I uploaded the image pack. Look at the homepage on this site.
Excellent theme! I definitely agree it’ll give K2 a little competition :). I love this theme; not only does it look awesome, but it isn’t completely bloated with unnecessary plugins but yet it still has all of the essentials.
I’m going to have to agree with Steve Collins that a release of “Nocturnal” would make this theme even better then it already is.
I’ll thank you for your kind comments, but I’ll repeat that I don’t personally see this as a competitor for K2. Technically they fullfill different aspects (and K2 is a much more pro piece of code than Fauna, by the way!). Visually, they also achieve different goals, and I dare say K2 has an elegant simplicity that this theme has not.
In short, I don’t like the comparison of those two themes. They’re for each their audience, and I think, compliment each other.
Feel free to compare it to Kubrick though :) - by itself a great theme and the very reason for the existance of Fauna. Kubrick was the inspiration that made Fauna what it is.
It’ll probably happen. But for a little while longer I’m going to hold on to it…
Bug? The Noteworthy heart icon appears as a narrow red line on Firefox in OSX… Works fine in Safari and on everything in Windows.
And another (possibly dumb) question. How are you filling the sidebar with HTML content? For example, the “About Noscope”stuff on the Noscope home page and the Colophon.
Hi Joen,
The theme is, to me, the best one out there, hands down. Just as an aside, I ran my install through the W3C Validator and it gave a few errors. I haven’t modified anything, but I know you’ve taken some time to make sure the XHTML lines up…
http://blog.pixeldustfilms.com/
Just as an FYI…let me know if I missed something, as I haven’t touched any code…install of Wordpress is a fresh one as well…
G
And, just for the record, I just ran http://www.noscope.com/fauna/ through the same validator and it validated fine…
So perhaps one of my posts is causing the issue?
Thanks, Joen!
g
Ok, I looked at the code, ya’ll.
I’m using the Brian’s Latest Comments plugin, which is causing validation errors. Anybody else seeing that?
Just thought I’d let you know. Joen’s code is pristine and works great…but the plugin apparently wreaks havoc with some of the compliant code…
Steve,
Probably a bug. I’ll create a temporary bug page here on Wordpress where people can submit a comment. I won’t have time to look into it right now but I’ll write it down.
Well, on the home page there aren’t any smart database tricks there. I simply edit the sidebar and add my custom HTML code.
On the colophon, however, I’m using a trick that’s also available in Fauna, although maybe not as documented.
I add a “Custom Field” with a key called “sidebar”, and type in the Textile code right in the field, then click “add”. That’s it!
Gino,
Thanks for the update, and glad you like the theme!
I think the problem with Brian’s Latest Comments is mainly related to special international characters. When these are plainly served as they’re typed, the validator might spew some errors at times. It’s fixable and I’m sure it will be fixed at some point in the future.
hi, GRATE WORK!!
my only concern is this: on next beta will a diff file be available? i mean, i changed a lot all templates, for plugins to work… maybe a zip with only changed files would also be nice…
tnkz, and keep up the good work!
o, another thing….
how do i use the author.php ? and whats for.. maybe I’m not seeing something…
also, a list of already supported plugins would accomplish..
last thing for now…
eny idea why would this… http://wearemad.weblogs.us/archives/
be happening?!
Yeah! Great theme!
Thank you, Joen for sharing that so cute theme! I’m made some additions in commets template and CSS, and I translated Fauna into russian. It wonderfull theme!
Sorry my poor english,
Thanks a lot!
Task,
I will make a changelog of changed files. You can then use a diff software to see differences yourself, it would be quite a lot of work if I should do it. But don’t worry, I don’t expect huge changes.
author.php is mainly used for multi author blogs. If you look in template-postloop.php, you’ll see that by default I’ve commented out the author that wrote the entry. If you uncomment this, that link will link to the author page which shows some stats.
As for the problem with your archive page, I believe you can solve it by writing in below:
<br style=”clear:both ” />
Joen, really a big, big thank you. Such a wonderful theme, in an afternoon I was able to translate it and ever so lightly adapt it for our amateur theatre site, here in Fribourg (Switzerland). I don’t know yet were it will go from here, but it will definitely stay on Fauna’s base!
You can see it in action here: http://www.tcf.ch
The French translation will be available for everyone interested, but I need some time to clean up the files: I changed some code (well, adapted mainly the “Noteworthy” feature to automate the formatting of our “Show” entries) while translating, and the files as such will not work as fauna intended on another server. I hope that by next week you’ll have the French translation, if not give me a shout! ;o)
Serge,
I’m thrilled you like the theme.
As for translation to French, that’s also fantastic. I would gladly put it up on a langages page here.
However, there should be another way of translating the theme which might be smarter. All text in Fauna are written using a function called
_e(). This function allows you, as far as I know, to have all language strings in a separate file.I’ll look more into it.
Yes, I noticed it… Well, I wanted to get out with that site fast, so that translation is hacked into the files themselves. But I will look at translating it via that function: in fact, having a French WordPress (FR_fr.mo in languages folder) will already translate some strings…
Top notch theme! I just moved from K2 to Fauna. I also integrated My Flickr photos with the FAlbum plug-in, and My Diggs (personalized RSS from Digg.com). Took all of an hour for me to do. Thanks for making it so easy!
Many thanks Joen, keep up the work when and where you can.
I got this error when viewing a single post.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: show_manual_subscription_form() in ~/wp-content/themes/fauna/sidebar.php on line 53
Please check
Thanks
Sadish
Sadish,
I have no idea why that happens. The function is wrapped in a check for its existance first:
if (function_exists(’show_manual_subscription_form’)) {
show_manual_subscription_form();
};
so it shouldn’t spew errors. Have you made no modifications whatsoever to the code?
It appears twice in the same sidebar.php.
the second time, it is called without a check for its existence.
Thanks.
Embarrassing, I’ll add that to the buglist. Thanks.
There is no need to be embarrassed. Its still called a ‘beta’ isnt it ?
Also, I want to let u know, I am using your theme as the current theme in my website for now.
Also I have a suggestion. On the sidebar, for ‘calender, links and meta’, you are checking so many pages where you do not want this thing to show up. like not a category page, not a single page, etc.
instead you could just say where you want it to show up. In my version, I only check for is_home().
Also I tried to go to unicef.org and I couldnt find any links to ‘donate’.
If you can find it, let me know.
Good work my friend.
Thanks.
I’ll take note of your suggestion, thanks.
The donation link is hard to find, so I have updated the link on the frontpage.
You can also visit directly, here:
http://www.supportunicef.org/
Hi everyone. I just installed Fauna, and what can I say… it rocks! Excellent job! There is one hiccup, though: When I click on a category link, it just gives me a page template with no posts in it. I’m kind of stumped as to why this is happening. Any suggestions would be most appreciated! (www.seancull.com/blog/)
Very nicely done. I’m looking forward to seeing more of your work :-)
Wonderful theme, thank you so much. I am having a little problem with the Archives page. I used the template when writing the page. In the side bar area I am getting this error message
/home/xxxx/public_html/test/wp-includes/template-functions-post.php on line 378
Some error on my part most likely. Any help would be very much appreciated
URL is
http://cloudsinmycoffee.com/test/?page_id=5
Thanks again
I figured it out. It was my error. I had failed to fill out the page slug.
Hello Joen
I have been an admirer of Noscope for sometime and once i found i could use fauna on my site i never hesitated a moment.
Thanks for providing this it is simply beautiful.
Is there a list of supported plugins for this theme?
Thank you, Joen, for sharing your talents and hard work!
here is a list of features including plugins
http://www.noscope.com/fauna/features/
Thank you, Makki!
Just a quick question regarding links in the sidebar. I have a fairly lengthy list of links, but only some of them are showing up. Is this because Fauna is set to display only a specific category of links? I am guessing that I should peek at the sidebar.php file and look for get_links and see what the settings are there, correct?
I looked on the WP Codex today for documentation on get_links, but was unable to find anything.
Thanks in advance for help that anyone can provide. I’m really liking this theme, BTW, and I have already successfully installed most of the plugins. I am using WP 2.0, FYI, and other than the fact that a “thumbnail” of Fauna doesn’t show up properly in the PRESENTATION panel, Fauna and all the required plugins seem to be behaving as expected.
Craig,
I had a bit of fun with Fauna and WP 2.0.
Can you confirm if the handling of asides and noteworthy works? I suspect my last attempt failed due to a managled db — would be keen to hear if everything works ok.
Check that, just had a look. Yep - it’s my db. Bugger. :)
Hellooo, Joen :)
first of all,
Thanks for the wonderful ‘Fauna’ theme..
I found it on the last day of 2005..
and I really like it !
Ok, there is a well-meaning suggest to you :
Could you reduce the size of the green image which is on top of this theme,pls?
In short, this is the best theme I’ve ever seen.
Jack,
Filesize? Maybe. Width / height? No, you do that with your customization.
Craig,
I’ll double-check the link code for the sidebar.
As for Wordpress 2.0 compatability issues, I’ll get to work on that asap.
Joen,
thanks for reply : )
yes, you are right..
I would do resize the green image by myself if I can do it..
I have to say that I use the blog(***.wordpress.com) which Wordpress.com offered so I can’t do that with my customization :(
for this reason, I can do nothing on it :(
could you please give me any suggests about it?
Jack, you should probably contact directly the WordPress.com maintainers (there should be a feedback link on the upper right hand of your dashboard for this purpose). I doubt Joen can do much about that himself.
Actually I do have an idea.
With Wordpress 2.0 (based off the fantastic work of Michael Heilemann), it’s now possible to include a customization page / options page for themes. See http://wordpress.org/development/2005/12/wp2/
On this page I suppose I could add fields for image URL, width and height. How about that?
Probably not until Beta 3 though.
en..
thanks for the quick reply again :D
I will wait for that moment :)
I’m slowly catching up with all the comments here sorry.
I’m hard at work on Beta 2, and things are going well.
Craig,
Thanks for the get links bug report. I was getting all the links from category 1. The get links function should simply grab links from “-1″ instead of “1″ to get all the links. Fixed in b2.
Brendan,
Sorry to hear about your mangled db. I hope Fauna didn’t give you any trouble.
I have upgraded my dev site to wp 2, and Fauna works fine including the noteworthy/aside aspect… are you still having problems?
That said, it seems that the migration to simpler rewrite rules for wp2 is really buggy. I’m getting 404s for some posts and some categories. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a fauna thing though.
Joen
It might be Wordpress bug 2162, having to do with the word Wordpress in your post title/slug (oh, irony). It’s got a fix in there that you can manually apply to Wordpress yourself if you think that this might be your problem.
Mike,
That does seem to be the problem on the Fauna site, though my main Noscope site also seems to be suffering from more problems, some having to do with a few hacks of mine.
Mike,
It seems another problem with my main Noscope wp 2 installation is that various conditional statements like is_home aren’t working. Damn.
Oh yeah, I don’t doubt it. That’s why I’m staying away from WP2. For now at least. It’d be great if Fauna Beta 2 worked in 1.5, but I understand if you don’t want to test it out in two environments. I’ll stay on Beta 1 until WP2 matures enough… and they get some QA going on.
Actually, it seems that on a crips and clean non-garbled fresh installation of wordpress 2.0, there were no problems with Fauna at all, meaning I didn’t have to make any WP 2 ONLY changes for Fauna. Only a few - like adding a screenshot, and a little surprise gift I have - but WP 1.5 simply ignores them.
All in all, it seems like Fauna Beta 2 WILL be fully 1.5 and 2.0 compatible (unless something scarey pops up). Now if only the WP team could fix their bugs! Stable release huh?
Welcome to my own personal hell. That’s due in part to pretty bad issues WP2 has with some is_ statements (there’s a couple of show stoppers when used in the loop) — the other half of the equation is the db.
You can’t upgrade the whole kit and caboodle, basically. The only way I could get the upgrade to happen was to backup the ‘default’ wp table set only and upgrade that. Forget any table that isn’t part of the core db and things become more predictable.
In my case I exported the core tables, ran a “search and replace” to change the wp_ prefix and then imported them back in.
This is just imho, obviously, but 2.0 isn’t quite ready for release. A brand new install, sure, great — upgrade..? my advice is to ‘tread real careful like’. :)
My site upgraded just fine! :) I’ve been upgrading the same database since version 0.70 and while I can’t claim to have never had any problems, for the most part, WordPress has worked just fine.
Maybe I’m just not pushing the software to the edge of its capabilities like some people do!
Glad to hear it Craig.
I think (hope) my db upgraded fine… but I’m still having major problems on my main Noscope site: basiclally /journal is a 404 page. Probably a virtual / real folder conflict… it works when I reset the permalinks to non-htaccess ones.
Argh.
Hey Joen.
I really like your work on the Fauna theme. I’ve used it and i think it looks great! I have one thing though there i bothering me. I can’t make new categories in the sidebar. ‘Links’ and ‘Meta’ are the only thing shown, despite my attempt to make serveral categories ind the editor. (eg. blogroles).
Isn’t possiple to make categories for different kinds of links on the main blog page?
I hope you can help me.
Jonas
Jonas,
Right now, adding the code to show categories on the homepage (currently it’s only shown in the archives, which have to be manually created too — thats easy though), has to be done manually.
Open sidebar.php in a template, and go to line 141 (it says “/* Category List */”).
Now change it from
/* Category List */ if (is_category() || is_page("archives")) {to
/* Category List */ if (is_category() || is_page("archives") || is_home()) {That should do it.
Hey again.
Thanks for the quick response.
But what i ment was not the post categories. I was interested in having different link categories.
Is that possiple?
Shall I test it? Hmm.. it looks fantastic :)