Fauna RC (Release Candidate)
I’m immensely proud, on behalf of the Fauna team, to present to you the release candidate (RC) of Fauna! Tadaa!
To sum up Fauna RC in one sentence: The Fauna theme is nearly final. RC has all the features the final version will have, and it has the final look. All that remains before Fauna is “1.0″ is to fix possible bugs that appear in this release.
Personally, I am really proud of RC. I think it’s the most stable and useful release yet. It is also the release that has focused the most on fit and finish of all the releases.
Problems with the sidebar being stuck on the left? Read this!
Due to changes to the default style, you need to upgrade your old fauna customization. Read more on this.
If you’re upgrading, read this
- After uploading the new RC files, it is recommended that you manually copy all your customized options from the options page (Presentation > Current Theme Options) to notepad, then delete all options (Delete Options button) and insert them anew!
Noteworthy Changes
- Springcleaning
All code has been gone over, cleaned up and optimized. Code snippets that repeated over several template files (404 messages, next/previous links) have been extracted into separate included files. Directory structures have been cleaned up with a brand new and more logical “custom style” structure. Even the options page is majorly cleaned up. - New options
Tired of the “Blog” link? Rename it! Want to create a yellow sticky note like the one seen on the Fauna homepage? Do it! Want to specify your own limits to how many sidenotes to show? Do it! - Quote comments
Comment a lot? Make use of the new quote comment feature. To quote an entire comment, click the quote button. To quote just a part of it, select the part of the comment you want to quote, then click the quote button. Simple, and pretty elegant if I may say so myself. - Slightly updated look
With a unified feed icon (now only one icon, same size), a tag icon, a uniform placement of commentlinks and relevant post meta moved below the header, Fauna RC has a look that I think is fit for 1.0. - Improved handling of “Custom Styles”
With the Style Directory open, changing the look and feel of a Fauna site has never been easier. We’ve got some great custom styles coming up (the community has really impressed me here), so this will really help people customize the look of Fauna.
Be sure to view the full changelog.
Next
With the new style directory in place, I will be working with style creators to make sure their themes look the best on Fauna RC, and make sure they’re properly linked up from the Style Directory.
More importantly, I will work with the community in creating a RTL (Right to left) custom style to make sure Fauna looks great in Arabic and other RTL languages. Hopefully, RTL users will be able to add this custom style as an addon, to immediately get RTL features.
Finally, with small “help” links in the options page, I’ll get to work on some documentation of the various features of Fauna, so that no feature goes forgotten.
The end is in sight! Next stop for Fauna is 1.0 final! Once that happens, I’ll see what I can do to get Fauna to wordpress.com.
Great news! Thanks for all your hard work Joen and the team, I’ll be sure to upgrade my blog to RC sometime this week. :)
hawesome! i’ll check it out when i get home.
Great theme! I just wanted to note that it seems with the new version my footers for Spam Karma and Bad Behavior aren’t centered at the bottom anymore. I’m not savvy enough to figure out what code to tweak to fix it. Can anyone help?
Congratulations to all, this is inspired design with lots of hard work to back it up! I will be updating soon.
Hi Joen! The new version looks great, and I have already updated my site to use it. I can tell all the hard work that went into updating this new theme. I can tell that you put a lot of time into not just creating the theme, but Doing It Right. I can immediately tell the benefits of hosting the code at Google and getting help from others.
As usual, I’ve got some nit-picky things that I think could be corrected before you release version 1.0. Here’s my site for reference: http://www.mikegoodspeed.com/
1.
If you look at the sidenote on the sidebar, the feed link goes here:
http://www.mikegoodspeed.com/blog/categories/feed/
but I think it should go here:
http://www.mikegoodspeed.com/blog/categories/sidenotes/feed/
2.
If you look at the Current Theme Options -> Custom stylesheet URL, you say
The default is
styles/default/default.css.I just wanted to let you know that it’s very easy to select the period at the end of that line when trying to go back to the default. Maybe reword it so that the code isn’t at the end of the sentence (”%s is the default.”) or something. In the next line when you say that the stylesheet must be in a certain location, you don’t include the period and make it easy to copy.
3.
IMHO, the ASCII art isn’t very professional, but if you’re going to have it, you can’t use tab indentation because tabs are different sizes in different editors. Line 3 of style-ieonly.css includes a tab or two that pushes that line to the right in the Wordpress editor.
4.
By putting the default fauna style style spreadsheet in
styles/default/default.cssyou make it impossible to edit that file from in Wordpress’ theme editor. Now if I want to make changes through Wordpress’ theme editor (every version I go in and set-moz-border-radius:10pxon theboxclass) I have to make them instyle.csswhich gets applied to all fauna styles, even if I only want that change in the default style. I understand why you are putting it in the directory structure (to show other developers by example where it goes) but I just wanted to put this out there and see if you think the pros of being a good example style outweigh being editable in Wordpress’ theme editor.–
And here’s a question for you:
If I go into the theme options and select a background to play around with for my blog, selecting things like background repeat, and horizontal and vertical align, and then go back to the default wallpaper, will my choices on those 3 radioboxes effect the default wallpaper? There is no “no-choice” option, and when you use radioboxes, once you select something, one item always has to be selected. I haven’t used this feature ’cause I’m scared!
And an unrelated question:
I’d like the ability to, when people comment on a post, the comment appears on the current page without a page reload, all AJAX-y style. That’s a plug-in, right? Do you know of one that works with your theme? I’ve seen it done with other themes, but I can’t find any. This is a lazyweb question so feel free to ignore.
Thank you! I appreciate it.
Now to your feedback, (which is also great).
1. Will examine and try to fix for 1.0.
2. Will examine and try to fix for 1.0.
3. Personally, I think it looks fun. If more people dislike it, of course I’ll remove it. For now, I’ll write down that we should change the tabs to spaces.
4. Personally I have always liked the ability to edit the CSS in Wordpress, but disliked the way the editor works. In my opinion, Wordpress should allow people to either browse the style directory in some way, or at least type in the filenames themselves.
This was not the reason I changed the way custom styles worked, though. I did that, to simplify downloading and installing them, and to keep things uncluttered, especially when a lot of images were used. I believe that upgrading either a custom style, OR Fauna versions, will be easier with this structure.
This is a “known issue” to me, and unfortunately I have very few ideas how to fix it. Usability wise, you’re completely right of course. It could be much better. The reason it is like it is now, is for technical limitations. In other words, I’m very open to ideas.
There are a few “addons” planned for Fauna, and I’d welcome an AJAX commenting addon. The reason it’s not part of Fauna, however, is that I have not yet seen a single Wordpress blog use AJAX comments with success. It’s either slow, unstable, or a combination of the two.
Congratulations Joen!
and I really mean that, haha :) right in time for Wordpress 2.0.5!
I also greatly appreciate some of the instantly obvious fixes and all those little ones which take so long to read yet alone accomplish!
*thanks for the styles page*I hope I get around to making some cool styles before you go final 1.0
I’ve said this before but I should say it again, fauna is truly the only completely working theme out there, it never leaves you hanging - and it’s so customizable it’s fun! //
cheers!!!
yay!
I love the options page, and the template changes.. icons, tags, search results ..
they are rockin!
big smile :D
Thank you mo, I’m so glad you like it, and it’s great that you notice all the small changes!
By the way, one in the forums had trouble using faunalive with RC — I know how much people love faunalive, if you need anything from me to get it work, just let me know. Did I ever send you a vector version of that illustration, btw?
Thank You!
haha, yeah I guess there are some fauna users who like the fauna + faunalive combination, personally I liked the background options which have been already addressed in RC, and the corner colors which helped montage transparency upon using custom backgrounds - all of which ALL have been addressed in RC. I haven’t looked at the new code yet, but I’m pretty sure that makes my ‘RC’ add-on a less pervasive one! :)
I’ve learned some php last summer, so I will try to clean up the code.. make it xhtml compliant.. make it look more streamline to your fauna style.. YET there is still one bug, which has kinda stumped me.. I have already mentioned it in the last paragraph of this comment.
> help? really?! haha, YES!
I have seen your awesome flash work, and I know you’re pretty much what they call the expert in flash if flash ever had one - so I wonder if you will be kind enough to look at the problem description, and see why this happens.. maybe its something obvious that I’m just not aware of. (?) If so I will email you a more detailed explanation of the problem with the
.flasource attached for further investigation. Of course I will try my best to find a solution in parallel to your help.> But about the vector version. Yes! I think I downloaded a photoshop file from your website some time ago. Thanks for the offer!
Joen, I always have appreciated your work and support all the way!
:D
Hi mo,
Sorry for the late reply, and thanks for your kind comments. Of course I’ll help you, just email me and we’ll figure something out.
love the new changes, I’m especially enamored with the new options page.
one question though, for some reason no matter if the left or right sidebar option is clicked, the sidebar is on the left.
Hi yahaira,
I love your fauna customization, but it is also the cause for the sidebar location not working! In RC, the default style has changed, so that the right side location is default. In the previous style, which I see you still use (http://pureknits.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/fauna/fauna-default.css) the default location was to the left. And so, you have to copy the new code from the new default style (styles/default/default.css) to your customized fauna-default.css in order to get the sidebar to work.
Read more here:
http://www.noscope.com/fauna/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=165
Thanks Joen,
I am currently working on making it compatible with RC, also XHTML compliant..
I know how busy you are and so I will try my best to fix things myself, but I will keep contact with you for your generous help offer. Thanks!
Thanks a bunch. You’re the best.
Finally I’ve finished faunalive RC!
Some mentionable improvements include..
php code optimization.
Flash actionscript optimization.
Flash publishing optimization.
Removed duplicate code, or void code.. and such. The code looks very clean now.
Made the flash Valid XHTML 1.0
Included IE Active-X activation workaround.
Improved faunalive home page look; added a sample Techno color chart.
Added three new languages. (Danish, Farsi and Polish)
Turned off ’scroll’ with a switch variable to avoid the ‘firefox tab stall’ [you can hack it on again]
Thus, faunalive is now completely glitch free.
Evening Joen, just thought I’d drop by and show off the latest incarnation/bastardisation of Fauna I’ve made. A lot of the codebase has changed (div stacking order, for instance), but the framework is pretty-much all Fauna.
http://newklear.org/blog/ is the main one I’ve been working on, it’s about 85% complete so far. http://cogito.underthetable.be/ is the other mod of it, but that’s slightly less advanced in terms of code progress.
Wanted to thank you and your team for making such a sexy layout, it’s one of the most versatile customisation bases around for Wordpress :)
Wow, beautiful work! Very nice!
Very impressive! If you didn’t tell me, I wouldn’t have recognized the Fauna beneath it!
@Ben: indeed very impressive!
very nice ‘fauna-like’ themes,
I really enjoy their design ;)
After 3 or 4 days of pondering to make things actually work.. I think I finally got it, haha.. I wonder though is it working only on my computer screen,, phew that was not easy!
faunalive now “degrades gracefully” to the default or chosen jpg header, when flash doesn’t load, or if version is not available. (Also, jpg header is not downloaded when flash successfully loads.)
First of all, this is the best Wordpress theme currently existing! Great work!
Secondly, I took the liberty of quickly creating a little integrated Zen photo theme. I didn’t put a lot of effort in it, but I could surely clean it up some and release it to my fellow fauna supporters, if there’s any interest in it. Check it out here.
Joen,
I love “fauna!” I think it is one of the best Wordpress themes out there. I’m not a programer, so I always had a hard time picking out a theme that was easy for me to use. I almost gave up and then I found “fauna” and I was able to get my blog up and running. Thank you so much for all your hard work! I just updated my blog with the “RC fauna” and it was such a smooth transition.
Thanks again.
Take care,
Alyssa