Fauna is a free Wordpress 2.3 theme (and it’s finished and done!). It’s pretty good looking, really extensible and rather simple to use. If you’re already convinced, download the theme right now and get started. Otherwise, here’s a quick bulletpointed list of reasons why Fauna is worth your time:

• Clean templates. Engineered to allow you to hack the hell out of them.
• Simple. All features have been weighed carefully: if it’s not clean and out of the way, it’s not in Fauna.
• Like theme options? We’ve got plenty. Press Page Down for details.
• Don’t like theme options? Throw out functions.php. I dare you.
• Want your own design but a clean base to build off of? Throw out the CSS and build your own styles.
  That was the quick introduction. Here’s the real one.

Say hello to Fauna

Want it dark? Pick one of the bundled styles:

There are in fact, plenty other bundled styles, including Frost, offered by co-fauna-developer James Huff.

The style selector looks like this:

Fauna comes bundled with dozens (3, actually) delicious headers.

No header is also an option:

Do you speak arabic? Fauna loves you! It comes bundled with an RTL theme:

Want to upload your own header image? Fauna does that using pushable buttons.

In fact there are many options:

• Custom style (drop style in styles/ folder)
• About text (Textile enabled)
• Sticky note text (Textile enabled)
• Rename the “blog” tab
• Side bar position (left or right)
• Scale mode (liquid or fixed)
• Noteworthy icon (text-symbol or image)
• Enable popup comments
• Show trackback body text
• Show author link in posts
• Enable archives page
• Custom header (select between no header, several bundled headers and custom uploaded image)
• Header height
• Rounded top corners on header (uses JS, applies even to your own uploaded images)
• Custom background

There are lots of other great features such as both “aside” and “sidenotes” support, built-in hooks for all sorts of commonly used plugins and so on. You can gorge in the features on the dedicated features page. You can even look at more screenshots if you want that.

Remember: Fauna is charityware. Be nice to the moose. It’s a really kind animal, just like Fauna. Join the happy friends charity club today and start spreading the message: world moose in our time!

It’s that time of year,
the snow is near.

Fauna is final,
isn’t that radical?

Hopefully you’ll like it,
employ it as you see fit.

Share it as charityware,
port it here and there.

So there it is. Several years of development by a committed team. All wrapped up and final. Compatible with all the best plugins, and the newest Wordpress. Go on and install it!

That also means Fauna 1.0 Final will be Wordpress 2.3 and newer only!

For users stuck on Wordress 2.1 and up to 2.2.3, you can download version 1.0 r103 from Google Code. That version will work on 2.1 to 2.2.3, but not on 2.3. The main difference should be how Faunas “smart categories” are handled.

Stay tuned!

[Update]: You can now download Fauna 1.0 r112. It’s a Wordpress 2.3 compatible build with tags and fixes and unless new bugs crop up, this will become the final version.

[Update 2]: 1.0 r114 is now available for download.

Ta daa! A logo for Fauna. Since “fauna” means “a living organism characterized by voluntary movement”, the logo takes the shape of a swedish moose, the kindest and coolest animal you’ll ever encounter..

This logo is made in celebration that the next version of Fauna will be the final one. The big 1.0. Woohoo!

• Wordpress.org has better up-time than this site.
• It’ll share the hall of many other great plugins.
• It’s located in a neat and tidy SVN repository, so it’ll be easy for someone else to pick up and take over development. (Interested?)

Note: Textile Live Preview (Ajax Version) has also been translated to polish.