Fauna Beta 5
Fauna Beta 5 is by and large feature complete. I do not expect to make any further huge changes to a future release, only bug-fixes, adjustments and cleanups.
Note: It is recommended that you copy your options to notepad, then delete all options and insert them anew!
Note: If you use Textile Live Preview, be sure to update to version 0.2, since Beta 5 no longer supports 0.1.
Noteworthy Changes
- Fauna is now fully localized
The work was started by Gabriela from Germany, and finished by Ralph Inselsbacher from Austria. Most notably, Ralph has been hard at work making sure each and every line of code in Fauna is fully translatable using optimized language files. I owe huge thanks to these two samaritans for their excellent work, Ralph in particular for his blood and sweat.
The fruit of Ralph and Gabriela’s work can benefit people speaking German already now. Download the language string from Ralphs website.
Important: If you plan to translate Fauna to a language of your choice, be sure to read about Wordpress Localization first, so you can make good use of Ralph’s work. It’s much faster and more flexible that way. - Liquid Width support
As you can see on this very site, Fauna can now scale to fit 80% of your browsers width. If you design the header right, Fauna will properly tile it and using CSS add the rounded corners dynamically! - Specify custom headers for your pages or even posts
If you feel like adding a different header for every section of your website, this is now quickly and easily done using custom fields. Just edit the page or post to which you want the custom header, and add a custom field with the key “header”, and the absolute or relative URL to the header image as value. - Remember
my-hacks.php? Enterfunctions-custom.php
This feature will probably not be noticable at all for casual users, but for those of you who want to hack it, you might grow to like this file. Basicallyfunctions-custom.phpis a simple PHP file in which you can paste or write your own PHP functions you want to use in your themes. Those functions will immediately be availabe to all sections of your theme. I’m using it for my redesign, and I’m loving it.
Be sure to view the full changelog.
Next
Since Beta 5 is feature complete, I hope to make only two more releases after this: RC and Final. That means the end is in sight. For now, thanks to Ralph and all the people in the forums for their help.
Enjoy Beta 5, and let us know what you think!
Joen, thank you for the nice words! It is a pleasure working with you and i’ll stay ’till the end ;-)
Congrats Joen + Gabriela + Ralph,
Gotta update faunalive now ;)
The better fauna gets the better our websites look!
Thanks!
Joen,
Can i make a chinese localization edition when i get the final release?
:P
You’re very welcome, but I would prefer it if you read this article:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress#Localization_Technology
and used the bundled PO and POT files for your translation. If you do that, it’ll be MUCH easier for you to translate, and it’ll also be easier for others to use your translation file.
WOW!
Big changes Joen,
now custom post headers, just what I needed!
;) luckily it looks like it takes custom width and height values also.
Great Job !
Awesome. I love this theme. Can anyone give me instructions to how I can upgrade from beta 4 to this latest beta 5?
San said:
Download B5 and just upload/overwrite your old fauna files and your done!
Joen,
So far I’ve found one little bug, the Noteworthy icon doesn’t seem to default to the heart instead it defaults to nothingness.
It’s looking great and I’ll have a compatible
darkfrost.cssheading your way soon.The ‘this entry’ sidebar element should be above the other elements like ‘categories’ and ‘ongoing discussions’ or atleast i think so.
Oh and the ‘formatting your comment’ link… do you think that should be right aligned now because of the liquid widths?
- The ‘edit this’ link for trackbacks and ping backs I think should be in the main box to the right of the title and date/time.
- Maybe make the RSS Icon a customized on/off/user image in the fauna options.
- Possibly add the ‘Powered by Wordpress & Fauna’ text into a textbox int he options page so users can easily add their own copyright notice.
- If the calandar is turned on, it should show up on year, month & day archive pages.
- The WP Calandar CSS should set the days of the week letters to be centered in their cell. Currently they’re defaulting to the left and it’s very noticeable in a wide liquid layout.
I think the sidebar needs some reordering done, the most relevant and most important sidebar elements don’t seem to be at the top in some cases.
An issue with the time/date’s has been created with the beta 5.
If you have a look at the post-meta on an install without Time Since installed it reads “
Filed in Category 8:23pm by Author” which clearly reads incorrectly and isn’t very useful as the time of day on the journals index page isn’t going to tell us much.So you could always change the wordpress time field to be something like “
\o\n F jS, Y \a\t g:ia” which makes the post-meta and sidebar post-meta read much better, but then comes the issue of the Pingbacks and Trackbacks reading something like “pingbacked Posted April 27th, 2006, on April 27th, 2006 at 11:46 am“Oh there’s another little bug, the word “Posted” needs to be removed from the trackback/pingback so it doesn’t read “…trackbacked Posted…”
So then you could always hard code the full date/time into the postloop file, but that means everything in the theme is perfectly automated or optionable other than this!
So I propose that you maybe add yet another option to the options page to set in a custom date/time string for the post-meta that defaults to something like “
\o\n F jS, Y \a\t g:ia“.Maybe an even better idea is adding an extra little funtion to the custom-functions file that adds a new date/time function, like;
fauna_date();or something.Anyway, sorry for the massive buglist to keep you busy!
Levi,
I just want to point out that I really appreciate your feedback like this. As you hopefully know, I’ll go through all of those comments and fix them once I get to it.
Two things:
1. I’m sorry I haven’t put up darkfrost into a theme directory yet, trust me I want to, I’ve just got my hands full.
2.
Well, I’ll “fix this” in the way that I’ll make sure upgrading is easier. However, it is “kinda” expected behavior since those are new options that were added, and those options default values won’t be filled in unless you delete all options, deactivate the theme, and activate it again. This is also the reason most of the Beta 5 upgrades I’ve seen don’t have rounded corners on the header… they should be enabled by default, but “defaults” are only defined on activation.
Ah, I see. Maybe I’ll have a look at the theme options setup and see if there is a better way to define defaults so they actually default on first run.
Don’t be too worried about darkfrost and the daunting bug-list, I can understand how busy you must be so take your time and if you want any help with anything what-so-ever, just say so.
Hell, I’d be happy to try and fix some of these bugs/issues I’ve found, you just tell me which onces you want changed and I’ll get stuck into it. I just figured there is no point trying to fix some of these bugs without your knowledge on how you want it to be when it’s working properly. :)
Thanks again for an awesome theme.
Levi said:
Actually they DO default on first run, but an upgrade is not considered “a new” run…
As for the bugfixes, I really appreciate you wanting to help out, which I’m open to. I’ll think about it the next few days and see how it could work out. Basically, since B5 is feature complete, the remaining issues will just be to make sure everything works like it’s supposed to, and that it’s as clean as elegant as possible.
On the author page the “There is one author attached to this weblog.” bug still exists, it only ever counts that there is one author.
This is trivial, but I just installed the “Linkblock” widget, and it somehow resolved the little problem with the links heading not matching the others in sidebar. Thanks again; I am enjoying your theme so much.
For those who are interested; Fauna: Darkfrost Beta 5 is available for download.
Beautiful beautiful stuff Levi, thanks so much for your hard work. I really appreciate it.
Oh, how about an option for chaning the sidenotes count limit?
Levi said:
Already thought of that :) Just needed one vote!
Levi said:
That would be great.
This is a fantastic theme. High quality, lots of features and it’s still open for creativity. I didn’t have to modify it much to get it as I wanted. Great work!
faunalive Beta 5 ready for service ..
Get it while it’s Hot!“, lol ;)
Hello,
I have a question considering subcategories: are they supported by version 5.
I have a blog at edublogs where fauna beta 3 is running. My problem is that on the sidebar it doesn’t show subcategories. I hope I didn’t overlook the information on this site.
Cheers, Christian
hermeschris said:
Ok, I saw that subcategories are only considered if there is a blog entry for the corresponding meta-category. Is this intended? I guess there are often cases where the meta-category will not have entries. But maybe just in my case. Cheers, Christian
hermeschris said:
hai chris,
try this one http://www.webspaceworks.com/resources/cat/wp-plugins/31/
see it in action in my testblog:
http://www.sternengarten.info/fauna/
look at the “wordpress” category
(i really should try to improve my english grrrr)
thx for your great theme. i am very satisfied and like the design so i use it.
Great THEME!
Hi, I downloaded your theme, uploaded the files and applied the theme…but i had a problem, my site “disappeared”, even the wp-admin, i wasnt able to login, until i deleted the fauna folder and everything went back to normal. Tried again and the same thing happened, i noticed when applying the theme, a new “fauna” button that had this link:
http://www.eberthmq.com/wp-admin/themes.php?page=../themes/faunas/functions.php
oh, btw I have wordpress 2.0.3 installed, could that be the problem?
tnx in advance
Eberth said:
oh and the “s” at the end of faunas it’s because on the second time instead of deleting the folder i just renamed it.
Hi, Joen, thanks for this little gem. I am starting to love this theme by days. However, could you point me where I can find information about supported plug-ins, and also what are default.pot and defailt.po files for?
Eberth,
I don’t quite know what happened to your site, but if I find a solution, I’ll post it here.
AsceticMonk,
The list of supported plugins is available on the features page: http://www.noscope.com/fauna/features/
The default.po, and default.pot are for localizing the theme. This is only if English is not your native language, or English is not the language you want to use on your blog. In those cases, you can either use the PO and POT files for quick translation of the theme (these files contain ALL text strings in the entire theme), or you can be lucky and download an already translated “MO” file and you’re all set. I think, for now, Fauna is only available in English and German, but I think Persian is on the way.
Thanks for the quick response! Couple more questions:
The scripts.js file inside meta folder, what is that for? And is the folder .svn inside meta folder used for CVS? Is it safe to delete that?
AsceticMonk said:
The scripts.js file contains a few javascript functions used various places in the theme. One such place is when you click “Formatting your comment”, that’s actually a Javascript function that opens that section. Another thing it is used for, is the “quote comment” functionality.
The .svn folder is a mistake. It shouldn’t be there, and you can safely delete it. We’ll make sure it’s not in the final release.
Hi Joen, I found a bug while modifying the theme last night. When a custom background image is provided, the generated CSS definition omitted the no-repeat property. I think it needs to be exposed in the theme option panel, where user can choose whether to repeat or no repeat. For example, on my site, I only changed the color of the background image, and I had to dig in function.php to manually add no-repeat property in it.
AsceticMonk said:
That’s something I included in faunalive . I also needed it for my website, so I just thought I’d throw it in ;) Kinda adds extra functionality, not a hard bug ..I do easy ones :))))
I just tried this out and the sidebar is positioned under the main post area?
I have minimal knowledge about modifying css’s etc, but if you think there is something I can do to fix this, please help. Thanks for the great work.
Here’s a look at the above problem
http://china.freepgs.com/journal/
Don Nyt said:
Regulus is a theme by binarymoon, I don’t know what your problem is but I see it. Maybe you can be better helped here
Ya, I was trying some different themes, and left that one up instead of Fauna. Anyways, it’s happening on other themes as well, so it’s not just a Fauna problem.
Hello, I have a easy question. If I wanna resize the post and comment’s text, which part of CSS that I should and how to modify?
Will you enable the text resize option in “theme option”?
Libraene said:
If you want to edit the font size, edit
fauna-default.cssand change these lines:body { font: 70%/190% Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; }Thank you very much. I will trying.
Nobody had this error when you load the theme? I couldn’t use the latest beta(5).
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare fauna_options_css() (previously declared in /var/www/wp-content/themes/fauna/functions.php:113) in /var/www/wp-content/themes/fauna/functions.php on line 112
Any ideas? It’s a
greattheme, congratz.AsceticMonk said:
This is fixed in RC.
Is there a way to add dates to posts and permalinks? As of now when I use the Fauna dark Frost theme it only shows the time the post was written on the main page and neither on a permalink. Am I perhaps just missing something?
Thanks.
Ed said:
This is a bug which will be fixed in Fauna RC, the next release.
Thank you so much for the use of your theme, “Fauna.” I’m not a programer and I found that I was really struggling with trying to get my blog started. I found that your theme just really helped me and was easy to use.
Keep up the great work!
Thank you , again.
A beautiful theme, thanks to all of you involved, like alyssa as a novice its great to be able to start out with something so good not just in looks but the way t works.
Very good looking ! thakns a lot ,, seems very nice when i upload it to mine.
Hi:
I?m a brazilian girl who loves these theme. I would like to kow that is possible to put a 3 colunm on it? Or you make fauna with 3 colunms?
Congratulations for your design.
Thanks a lot.
Claudia Renata said:
Thank you. Glad you like the theme.
Yes, it is possible to add 3 columns, but it’s not something I see coming to Fauna in the near future. A 3 column layout would have to be an addon to Fauna 1.0 final, which is months away.
So to put things plainly, you could write your own Fauna style that had a 3 column layout, but I don’t see one coming in the near future. Unfortunately.