With the days getting shorter, the leaves will soon be falling from the trees.
Just a reminder that the snowfall wordpress plugin does come with a graphic for falling leaves (snow1.gif) and I have switched to this effect until the snow begins to fall.

September 16th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
How do I change the graphics?
I’ve uploaded and activated the mod - but how to I change from snowflakes to leaves to hearts, etc.?
Thanks!
September 16th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
Attempt 3 to answer your question, Firefox keeps falling over on me. This time fired up IE
When you uploaded the plugin, you also uploaded the images sub-folder. Within that folder are 3 graphics files.
snow.gif
snow1.gif (it is actually leaves)
snow2.gif
The filenames are the original ones used by Dynamic Drive. I wanted as much as possible of their code left unchanged. Credit where credit is due…
If you now go to the adnim section of your wordpress installation, you will find under the options tab the sub-tab “Snowfall Effect”.
This tab allows you to reconfigure a fair amount, including the graphics file used.
Simply change the filename used in the grahics file (it is right at the top)
To use a different graphic from one supplied, just create it as a transparent gif, upload it to the same images folder, and use the same configuration section of options to assign the correct filename.
Remember that unix is case sensitive.
September 25th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Pardon the newbie question, but–having now downloaded and unzipped, what files go where?! (There is no README file).
Thanks in advance.
Jerry
September 26th, 2006 at 6:31 am
Almost all Wordpress plugins go in the same directory (it is very rare that other changes are needed anywhere else.
wordpress/wp-content/plugins
Copy the snowfall folder across to your server so you should end up with
wordpress/wp-content/plugins/snowfall/wp-snow.php
wordpress/wp-content/plugins/snowfall/edit-snows.php
wordpress/wp-content/plugins/snowfall/images/
etc etc
Once it is copied across, you should find the plugin listed on your plugins tab, and the options under options/snowfall effect
September 28th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
“wordpress/wp-content/plugins/snowfall/wp-snow.php
wordpress/wp-content/plugins/snowfall/edit-snows.php
wordpress/wp-content/plugins/snowfall/images/ ”
**Check! The files are there. the correct images are in the images folder.
“If you now go to the adnim section of your wordpress installation, you will find under the options tab the sub-tab “Snowfall Effect”.
This tab allows you to reconfigure a fair amount, including the graphics file used.
Simply change the filename used in the grahics file (it is right at the top)”
**I don’t find an “admin” section, nor any sub-tab saying “snowfall effect”. I DO, in my plugins tab, show that the “snowfall” plug-in is there, but when I activate it nothing happens. Nor do I see any “option” for selecting one or the other of the 3 graphics files.
Thanks in advance. (It DOES look cool HERE!)
September 30th, 2006 at 10:41 am
If you can see the plugins tab, then you are within what I refer to as the “admin” section.
Normally somewhere to the right of the plugins tab you will find another tab called “options”
Within that tab, there is normally another row of tabs for the options for different plugins you have installed.
Look for the one associated with the Snowfall plugin called “Snowfall Effect”
The most important thing is that it is working. Trouble shooting the plugin if it isn’t working is the hard part, and most often I can’t really help much
September 30th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
I see as I explore the wp-snow.php file in the plug-in editor that it only works with 50% or so of themes. I’m using a theme called Zurich–and I guess that’s one that it doesn’t work with.
Also, there is no “subtab” or “snowfall options” anywhere that shows after I’ve installed it.
Oh, well–cool plug-in. Apparently, it won’t work for me, though…
September 30th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
There is a good chance you are still looking in the wrong place - the 50% was a guess on first release, but from what I have seen so far, it is closer to 70 or 80% working, as long as the user hasn’t broken the template at some stage (I have broken this one twice in the past)
My main menu inside the Wordpress site admin has the follow tabs.
Dashboard Write Manage Links Presentation Plugins Users Options Logout (Andy Beard)
Under the Otions tab above I have
General Writing Reading Discussion Permalinks Miscellaneous Taggerati Bookmark Subscribe Me Sitemap Update Pinger Snowfall Effect Amazon AdSenseDeluxe
Some of those I don’t actually use on this blog yet, but most are fairly common from varios plugins.
If the interface really isn’t appearing within your admin, it is a major bug that I have never heard of before and needs to be fixed. (and it has nothing to do with the theme)
September 30th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
[…] [Download] [Plugin Page] […]
October 1st, 2006 at 4:05 am
No, that stuff is all appearing as you’ve described.
Just not the leaves/snow.
Is the issue possibly that “writeability” to the theme? If so, what would I need to look for to fix that. There’s some “comment” in one of the PHP files about that.
Again, I have the plug-in showing in the Plug-In menu–along with an “Activate/Deactivate” option. The “Snowfall Effects” show up in my “Options” portion. All of the files wrote successfully to the wp-content/plugins directory.
But I’m just not getting the leaves/snow when I click Activate.
October 1st, 2006 at 4:44 am
FYI, I tried changing the Zurich theme directory to writeable, tried changing its index.php to writeable–no change. No leaves.
October 3rd, 2006 at 1:43 pm
The best option might be for me to have a play with the specific theme, but I can’t find the download site.
The link at the bottom of the theme goes to an affiliate site rather than the authors homepage.
Is there any information within the theme itself of the source?
You might have received it from the official theme viewer site in the past, but maybe they have removed it because it is linkware.
October 8th, 2006 at 7:04 am
Nice plugin! But I have one issue with it:
Everything is OK when I am logged in, but when I am logged out, there is no falling!
Any help? Thanks!
October 8th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
I am honestly not sure what is causing the problem.
I have just chucked the theme ( 3 column relaxation clemens.orth.me.uk/3column_docs/documentation_and_download) you are using (unmodified) onto my test blog.
wpplugins.info/howto/ (note the theme shown on this blog changes all the time)
The test blog isn’t the lastest WP release, but that shouldn’t matter.
Try switching off plugins one at a time to see if that helps, or switching them all off to prove that it isn’t your modifications to the template itself causing the problems.
October 9th, 2006 at 12:46 am
I got the theme from this site:
www.topspotseo.com/roblog/category/word-press-themes/
The Zurich theme is at the bottom of that page.
What do you mean by “linkware”–and why would that have been removed from the theme viewer (which, I believe, is where I got it from)?
October 9th, 2006 at 12:50 am
Actually, it’s not called “Zurich” theme–it is called “Sunset Ver. 1.00″
I really appreciate all of your help on this–it’s truly a wonderful plug-in!
October 9th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
Hi Andy,
After disable and re-enable all the plugins one by one, I found that it was the plugin “Google analytics” that caused the problem of no falling after log-out. I have disabled it for the time being, and you can see there are leaves falling. I would be grateful if you could inform me when there is a solution. Thanks for the help.
October 10th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Can you give me the exact details of the Google analytics plugin, there are lots of them.
There is a good chance it is trying to hook onto the same thing at the end of the footer that we use, and maybe breaking something.
Jerry linkware is when a plugin author includes a backlink to a website in a theme or plugin design. Most of the time it is to the authors support site, but other times it can be to another one of their own sites, or they were paid to create a theme just to get links by someone else. It is what is known as Google juice - to help with search engine rankings.
A lot of the plugins I will be producing will be linkware. The snowfall plugin does have references to this site in it, and one of the snowflakes actually has a clickable link, though links in javascript are not the same as visible links for most search engines.
I will take a look at the theme later today - hopefully have some news for you tomorrow.
October 11th, 2006 at 2:04 am
I had just started using “Google analytics” myself. It’s a pretty neat piece of code that you just insert into your main index template and it keeps stats for you. I can log in at Google and find out where my hits are coming from geographically, how many “unique” hits I get per day/week/month, etc.
So that’s the problem, then–thanks R. King. Maybe, I’ll remove the code then and see what happens…
October 11th, 2006 at 2:12 am
Removed the analytics code.
Still no leaves after activation of the plug-in…
October 11th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
Jerry there is a difference between removing the Analytics code and removing a plugin. Different plugins work in different ways when inserting code. If it was a problem with the analytics code itself I would have found out about it a lot sooner.
October 12th, 2006 at 8:55 am
[…] You can download the plugin here or visit the Author’s Site. […]
October 13th, 2006 at 1:27 am
Hmmm…R. King must be referring to something else, then, when he says “Google analytics plug-in”. What I was using was just some code from the Google Analytics site that I put into my “Main Index Template”. There was no actual plug-in to install and activate.
October 14th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Hi Andy, and Jerry,
What I was referring to was the Google Analytics Plugin (www.semiologic.com/software/google-analytics/). After I disable this one, the Snowfall works without any problem.
Hope to see a solution soon and thanks!
October 22nd, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Jerry your problem is definately the base theme, but I am not sure where it is breaking.
p.s. sorry for the delay, I have been merging lots of sites together and upgrading lots of things and it took me a while to track this down.
R.King - it looks like I have a problem with Semiologic plugins, but not sure of all of them yet, or the reason why.
I have started a new post to track these things
wpplugins.info/13/snowfall-plugin-incompatibility-list/
October 29th, 2006 at 12:17 am
How do I download the falling leaves and snow???
Charlie
October 29th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Hi Charlie
There seems to be a small problem with wpplugins.org and I was linking through them for download popularity.
I have now added a secondary backup link to the downloads page to use until this problem is rectified.
wpplugins.info/3/snowfall/
The graphics files are all within the archive for the plugin, and there is an options page to change the name of the graphic to use.
October 31st, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Hi Andy,
One temporary solution for having both Google Analytics and Snowfall at the same time is to install WordPress Reports (tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/), which also inserts the Analytics code automatically, but it does not conflict with Snowfall.
Cheers!
November 20th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
Hi,
I’ve got a problem with the plugin. I can install it, ok, and activat it, but the snow appears behind the webpage, behind the news, but in front of the background…
How can I fix it? Thanks,
Phosky
December 1st, 2006 at 11:56 am
I would have to have access to the specific template being used to take a look for any compatibility issues. If your Wordpress theme is doing some strange things, it is most likely I won’t be able to fix it.
December 1st, 2006 at 4:11 pm
Uhmmm my theme is this:
themes.wordpress.net/columns/2-columns/831/mistylook-101/
One of most downloaded. Can yo say me how can I fix that, please? Thanks
December 1st, 2006 at 8:15 pm
This is a quick and dirty solution, but then the theme used quick and dirty solutions as well.
No guarantees if this is going to break something else but it does get the snowflakes displaying correctly.
I need to still include a code plugin here, so [] used instead of gtr than less than.
First of all
footer.php
You need to move
[?php wp_footer();?]
to outside the last /div, so just before /body
That will get the snow falling infront of everything else, but it is going to have a grey box around it unless it is a snowflake with a link in it.
File style.css
The border was assigned globally, rather than to each individual div, thus my dirty fix is to remove that global declaration.
img
{
border:0;
}
So now there are no boxes by default for images, which might make a lot of other plugins look better as well, as I am sure it affected lots of things.
If you need the grey border, you will have lots of CSS to play with, I am not a CSS guru
December 1st, 2006 at 8:16 pm
Oh, and to see it working, I now have it running on my test blog
wpplugins.info/howto/
December 6th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Oh, thanks you very much!!
It works fine
The unic problem is that if I scroll down the page, the snow dissapear, and you can only see it if you scroll up again
You can see it here: www.problog.es
See ya!
December 6th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
Ah, it’s now fixed xD I had it configured incorrectly, now works fine again
Thanks!!!
December 6th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
You might need to use “page height” instead of “window height” in the options.
With a long page I find it best to use a few more snowflakes as otherwise you can end up with nothing really showing.
It is a shame they disappear behind the videos
December 10th, 2006 at 12:11 am
I just loved the plugin. Worked first time absolutely no problems. What I think would be a great return hook to your site, would be a library of gif’s for all occassions.
Thanks very much for all the hard work.
December 11th, 2006 at 3:59 am
I am glad you like it and had no problem with installation.
I do plan on adding to the graphics library, and adding a few other tweaks, unfortunately resources are stretched.
December 23rd, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Andy,
you saved my christmas.
Thank you so much for the snowfall.
It covered in minutes the whole lake.
Best wishes and merry christmas to you and your family.
January 10th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
I’m using it on my site (sojoe.info) and it’s working great with all browsers I’ve tested. I shrunk down the snow flake images a bit and actually prefer them a bit smaller, something to consider for the library you’re building.
January 14th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
The good thing about this plugin is it is fairly flexible in what you can do with it.
January 28th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Thanks for this wonderful plugin. I love using it, especially on days with special occasions like birthdays. I like to write “Happy Birthday” greetings to my friends and have some kind of falling down image like colourful balloons. Nifty plugin. Keep up the good work / updates.
May 4th, 2007 at 4:33 am
Can someone please explain how to get this to work? I cannot find where to do this plug-in thing, and when I look in the help files, it says …
“Where is my plugins tab?
There is no plugins tab.
There is also no tab for editing a theme.
For a variety of reasons we do not permit the uploading and use of plugins on wordpress.com
We do not install plugins on an individual basis.
Themes are also not editable apart from those functions that are available such as widgets, changeable headers.
The range of changes that can be made will increase over time.”
So who’s right here and who’s wrong ??
thanks.
May 4th, 2007 at 11:03 am
You have to use the open source version of wordpress available on Wordpress.org to be able to use 3rd party plugins.