Christmas Snow for WordPress

Description

Christmas Snow adds an elegant falling snow effect to your WordPress site using a lightweight HTML5 Canvas engine. It still works the moment you activate it, and now you can shape every part of it from a friendly settings screen with a live preview.

Choose classic snowflakes, soft dots, festive emoji or your own image. Set how heavy the snow falls, which way the wind blows, where it appears and exactly which weeks of the year it should run. Everything you change is shown in a preview panel before you save.

Built for real sites

The effect is designed to stay out of the way of your content and your customers:

• Sprite based rendering keeps the frame cost flat even at high flake counts
• The animation pauses completely while the browser tab is in the background
• A separate, lower flake count is used on phones
• WooCommerce cart, checkout and account pages are excluded by default
• Visitors who ask their device to reduce motion never see the animation
• The canvas is marked as decorative so screen readers ignore it

Everything you can control

Appearance

• Flake type: characters and emoji, soft dots, or a custom image from your media library
• Any characters you like, so snowflakes, sparkles, stars or holiday emoji all work
• One colour or a mix of up to eight, blended randomly across the flakes
• Minimum and maximum flake size
• Minimum and maximum opacity
• Softness, for a dreamy out of focus look
• A depth effect that makes distant flakes smaller, slower and fainter

Motion

• Separate flake counts for desktop and mobile, plus the breakpoint between them
• Slowest and fastest fall speed
• Wind direction, gusts that swing the wind back and forth, and per flake sway
• Optional spin, with adjustable speed
• Cursor interaction: push flakes away, pull them in, or blow a gentle wind towards the pointer
• Settling snow that builds a drift along the bottom of the screen

Where it appears

• The entire site, the home page only, or a selection of content types and pages
• Always show on specific post or page IDs
• Never show on specific IDs
• Exclude WooCommerce cart, checkout and account pages
• Exclude search results and 404 pages
• Target desktop only or mobile only
• Show to everyone, only logged in users, or only logged out visitors
• Hide the effect from chosen user roles

Seasonal schedule

• Turn the snow on and off between two dates
• The range repeats every year, so you set it once
• Ranges that cross New Year work correctly, for example 1 December to 6 January

Presets

Six one click looks to start from: Gentle Drift, Classic Christmas, Heavy Blizzard, Golden Sparkle, Festive Emoji and Settling Snow. A preset fills in the appearance and motion settings and leaves your display rules and schedule untouched.

Tools

• Export your configuration as a JSON file
• Import a configuration onto another site
• Reset everything back to the defaults
• Copy the shortcode straight from the settings screen

Shortcode

Add [christmas_snow] to any page or post to force the snow on there, even where your display rules would normally hide it.

You can override a few settings for that page only:

[christmas_snow density="150" color="#ffd700" size="20" speed="1.5" wind="2"]

Supported attributes are density, color, characters, type, speed, wind, size and zindex.

For developers

Three filters are available:

• cwg_ppl_snow_settings filters the resolved settings array
• cwg_ppl_snow_should_display filters the final decision about showing the effect
• cwg_ppl_snow_config filters the configuration passed to the JavaScript engine

Perfect for:

• Christmas and holiday campaigns
• WooCommerce stores
• Blogs and business websites
• Temporary seasonal decoration