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!

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!

• Download Fauna RC2 (June 14th, 2007)

[Update]: Just discovered and fixed two tiny tiny fixes. The rc2 zip file above links to the new zip. If you downloaded the zip 2 hours after this was posted, you should be fine. Otherwise, “functions.php” and “header.php” have had tiny fixes.
[Update]: Allowed commenting.

Noteworthy Changes

• All-new options page! (See a screenshot)
  With the offered help of theme author comet Martin Hipp, Fauna is now equipped with a brand new and much improved options page. All the important options from the last version are still available — the big benefits being a usability and aesthetic overhaul, new features such as the ability to easily upload a custom header. Most importantly however, with the code improvements, we have taken the first steps to making sure a great new version of Fauna gets ported to Wordpress.com.
• Upload your own theme header!
  As mentioned above, part of the new options page gives you an ability to easily upload and crop your own pictures for use as image header.
• More easily select between custom Fauna styles
  Fauna comes bundled with a light and a dark look, easily selectable from a dropdown box on the options page. Additionally, our Right-To-Left custom style has huge improvements, and should help out Arabic and other RTL language based users.
• Fauna specific widgets!
  Fauna RC2 openly embraces Wordpress Widgets, a feature that’s been around for a while but is finally integrated in Wordpress 2.2. When you activate Fauna RC2, you automatically get access to a Fauna Sidenotes widget, that allows you to decide yourself where in your sidebar you want your Sidenotes to show up.

Up Next

According to the roadmap, the next version of Fauna will be the final one. Due to the major changes in RC2, however, I cannot promise there won’t be an RC3 before the final version. That all depends on the bugs that pop up after this release. We’ll see!

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.

• Download Fauna RC (November 14th, 2006)

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.