GEODynamic Backgrounds is a WordPress plugin that brings your fullscreen animated backgrounds into the world of geolocation. It helps you enhance your blog’s visual appearance by giving you total control over your background images.
Ever wondered how you site is perceived by your visitors from a certain part of the world? We all know that North-Americans don’t see things the way South-Americans do, and Europeans don’t have the same tastes as Asians do.
Well you can now give each one of them different website backgrounds, animated or not, overlayed with transparent patterns or not, based on your understanding of their culture, preferences and the message you want to deliver.
But how about giving your visitors backgrounds depending on the time of the day? Mornings are not like the afternoons, and night time … you get the point … Now you also have the power to control your backgrounds based on the visitor’s local time. Let him feel that you website is “talking” back to him.
GEODynamic Backgrounds offers all these and more… Check the info bellow to see a detailed featured list and usage instructions.
Features
- Display background images with slideshow on any WordPress 3.3+ theme
- Display background images based on geolocation using a free public API
- Background images are automatically stretched to fill any screen resolution and ratio
- Add patterns over your backgrounds to further spice up your site
- Images are loaded in a background process with AJAX to increase page loading speed and avoid flickering
- Control for what continent, country and/or time of day each picture should appear
- Timepicker for start and end time selection
- Add background images using the Media Uploader provided by WordPress
- Background images are animated with fade transition between them
- Control the delay and the speed of the fade between each background image
- Limit the system to display only the first image that suits the conditions for a certain visitor (no slideshow)
- Drag&drop AJAX ordering of the backgrounds
- Random order display
- Disable background pictures to save for later use
- Optimized database operations and logic for minimal impact on server performance
Requirements
- WordPress 3.3+
- PHP 5 .2+
- A free API key from ipinfodb.com, a free webservice that provides IP based geolocation informations (we provide a API key with the plugin but each account is limited at 2 requests per second in full speed so we HIGHLY recommend that you register for free and get your own API key)
- Great images for your backgrounds to wow your visitors
Instructions
- Activate the plugin
- Go to Settings > GEODynamic Backgrounds to setup your geolocation driven background slideshows
- Use the Add new background button to display the default Media Uploader of WordPress and either upload a file from your computer or use an image from your Media Library – click the Insert into post button to add the image to your list of backgrounds
- Once added, the image is given default settings (display on Any Continent, Any Country and from 12:00 am to 11:59 pm) that sets it to display for all users no matter the continent, country or time
- Hover over the background thumbnail to see a larger and uncropped version for better visual reference
- Click on the Edit button to change the settings of a background
- For each background you can set the Continent, the Country and the time interval that this background should be displayed in
- Setting the Country to a value other than Any Country will overwrite the continent setting, meaning it will not take into account – that certain background will only be displayed for the visitors from that country
- If you want a certain image to be displayed for visitors from 2 or more countries from a continent, but not for the whole continent, you will have to add the image from the Media Library for each country
- You can use drag&drop to rearrange the images – the backgrounds will be displayed for visitors in the order they are shown (unless you activate the Randomize Images Order setting)
- You can disable/enable a certain background image by using the ON/OFF button
- To remove a image from your backgrounds list use the Delete button
- For easier image management (in the case you gather up tens or hundreds of backgrounds) you have at your disposal a series of filters – show Enabled images, Disabled or All – and sorting by continent and country
- To change the global settings press the Settings button
- Here you can change the Transition speed (the time in milliseconds it takes to fade between two backgrounds) and Transition delay (the time in milliseconds to wait between two images)
- The next settings allow you to Randomize backgrounds order and Display only the first background image suitable for a visitor (even if we find more that respect the conditions) – this option virtually disables the slideshow
- You have a select box where you can choose from a list of transparent pattern images (15 right now) to display over the backgrounds. You can add your custom patterns by copying the files to the images/patters directory from the plugin’s directory.
- You also have a text field into which you can (and we recommend it) paste your geolocation API key taken by registering at ipinfodb.com (the free web geolocation service that we’ve decided to use, considering it offers very good performance and accuracy compared to other similar services – we haven’t used HTML5 geolocation for now because of the simple fact that this plugin has a global reach and the number of folks out there that are using old browsers is still very high; so we went with reliability this time)
- To reset the plugin data use the Reset button – it will delete all backgrounds and settings, adding only the default 3 backgrounds
- To uninstall the plugin (although we can’t find a reason you would want to do that) deactivate it from the Plugins Manager and click the Delete link; this way we will remove the database table and settings leaving you with as little “trash” as possible
Future directions
- Add HTML5 GeoLocation and give the user the option of using it or not
- Add more, carefully chosen, transition animations – zooming maybe, pixelating, etc
- Add options on where the backgrounds appear – front page, pages, posts, categories, etc
- Add an option to show the visitor a small button that lets him hide the backgrounds (temporarily or permanently)
- …other ideas that fly around our heads or come from you