GEOIP Weather Dynamic Backgrounds is a WordPress plugin that lets you set up fullscreen animated backgrounds based on weather conditions outside your visitor’s location (using Google’s Weather API ). It helps you enhance your blog’s visual appearance by giving you total control over your background images.
Ever wanted to have that gadget on your website that let’s you change it’s background according to the visitor’s current weather conditions? Well, you can now set different website backgrounds, animated or not (fade in between), according to the weather given by Google’s Weather API
GEOIP Weather Dynamic Backgrounds let’s you do these and more… Check out the info below to see a detailed list of features and usage instructions.
Features
- Display background images with slideshow on any WordPress 3.3+ theme
- Display background images based on weather using a free public geolocation API and Google’s Weather API
- Background images are automatically stretched to fill any screen resolution and ratio
- Images are loaded in a background process using AJAX to increase page loading speed and avoid flickering
- Control for what weather condition each picture should appear
- Display temperature in either Celsius or Fahrenheit degrees as a floating widget
- Add background images using the WordPress Media Uploader
- Background images are animated with fade transition
- 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 -> Weather Dynamic Backgrounds to setup your background slideshows driven by weather
- 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 that sets it to display for any weather condition
- 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 weather conditions that this background should be displayed in
- If you want a certain image to be displayed for 2 or more weather conditions, but not for all of them, you will have to add the image from the Media Library for each weather condition
- 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 options
- 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 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 7 backgrounds (one for each weather conditions and one for any)
- 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 development
- More weather widgets and information about current weather conditions like humidity, wind speed and so on
- As the current version has weather conditions grouped in 6 major categories, we may separate some of them based on popular requests
- Add possibility to use different GEOIP Weather APIs from more providers (given they are reliable)