Winter’s coming closer and the holidays are knocking on your door. We love this very special time of the year and we know that you do so too. The Snowflakes Stack helps you and your website prepare for the upcoming winter days by displaying sweet snowflakes with smooth transitions. The Stack will make your site snow from above!
Customisation options
Intensity: change the strength of wind which animates the snowflakes horizontally as well. You can choose between smooth, breezy, windy, strong wind, stormy and blizzard
Amount: choose the amount of snowflakes that should be displayed
Symbol: choose between winter related Emojis or unicode characters which reflect the snowflakes (NEW feature in version 4!)
Font: choose between 10 different fonts for the unicode characters to best fit with your site design (NEW feature in version 4!)
Speed: customise the speed of the fall
Minimum Size: how big/small the snowflakes should be at least
Maximum Size: how big/small the snowflakes should be at last
Colors: change the colors of the snowflakes. you can customise up to five different colors which are being picked randomly by the algorithm
Of course this Stack is also responsive and retina ready - we’ve also revamped the Stack’s icon.
The Stack just uses simple text characters or Emojis, it doesn’t even need any images which would slow your website. The Stack runs smoothly in the background of your site and won’t interrupt your visitors because we didn’t fill in any annoying x-mas music.
Learn more about all these awesome customisation options of the Snowflakes Stack by watching the Screencast on our website!
COMPATIBILITY:
Foundry Framework (Elixir Graphics): Yes
Total/Easy CMS (Workman): Yes
Themes: Works with most common ones, but not each and every is supported. Emojis are not supported with every theme, we recommend to use the unicode characters instead if this should be the case.
@RWtuts - I’ve tried to get into the WINTER mood by adding Snowflakes 4 to several of my websites. However, I have not gotten it to work on any of my Themeflood sites. Of the themes I have, it only works on Tesla by Elixir but not Voyager, Majestic, or Lunar also by Elixir. It does work with Marvel by Nick Cates. Unfortunately most of my sites were built using Will Woodgate’s wonderful themes that seem to be incompatible with Snowflakes. I’ve tried both the Emojis and the other choices.
Also, when I’ve added the Snowflakes stack to my site and then go to Preview mode (and see that it isn’t working), when I go back to edit mode, the only stack that shows up is the Snowflakes stack. This seems weird to me.
@bpequine as stated in the compatibility section, not each and every theme is supporting emojis yet. However, the Stack should be working with the unicode characters on almost every theme, so I’m curious to see what’s the problem. Please send us more details on this, including your project file(s) by using our contact form so we can work things out: http://www.rwtuts.net/contact-form/index.php
@RWtuts I sent a project file of a test site on the latest version of Will’s Ocean theme and tried to send more than one file on the same support form but it wouldn’t let me. I then tried to send the other files on another support ticket and I get an error message. Let me know what else to do.
Thank you
Mary
@bpequine Hey Mary, please take a look at our response via E-Mail where you can reply to with your other attachments so we can take a closer look. Thanks
@RWtuts@willwood@nickcates@Elixir
I’m trying to troubleshoot (along with RWtuts support) the reason why their new stack, Snowflakes 4 is not working on many of my themes but does work on a few of them. Thought maybe theme developers would know if there is something different in the code used for the themes it does or doesn’t work for. And thought this might be useful to others trying to “winterize” their websites.
I tested the website (which is on Themeflood’s Ocean theme) which I wanted to use the Snowflakes 4 stack for and when it didn’t work, I simply tried changing the theme (just clicking on a theme from my theme palette). Here is what I found and I’d be interested in anyone else’s experience with Snowflakes 4 on their theme/website.
For Elixir themes that I have, it (SF 4) works on Feather, Droplet and Tesla. It does not work on Majestic, Lunar, Voyager, or Voyager Pro.
For Nick Cates, it works on Marvel but not Reason which are the only 2 I have
It does work on 1LD’s Affero, on Brandon Lee’s Allegro, on Multitheme’s Lander.
If a theme didn’t work with the snowflake emoji, I tried with the heavy snowflake
Please chime in if you’ve had any experience with the Snowflakes 4 stack.
@bpequine I’ve checked, but I don’t seem to have a support case open for you in my system.
I don’t have access to this stack and see no free demo version available for it. So there is little I can test. Being able to replicate a problem goes a long way towards resolving it. Normally I don’t provide free support for stacks from other developers. Too much unfamiliar and foreign code that can take many hours to troubleshoot!
My best guess (without seeing the problem and not having access to the browser console) is that the stack is…
Incompatible with something in the theme (e.g. two separate versions of jQuery or Font Awesome Icons)
Doesn’t like the order that pre-existing theme CSS or Javascript is being called in
Is relying on something being present in the theme (like jQuery) which either is not available or is scoped and not visible to other addons
CSS box-sizing, resulting in element sizes being calculated wrongly and snow flakes becoming invisible
Layering of snowflakes or other graphic effects behind theme elements, due to z-index issues
I’m not understanding the bit about emoji and heavy snowflakes. Does this mean you have different methods to apply snowflakes and neither works?
These snowflake effects tend to come along annually. The code to create them is often freely available online as opensource. I’m not aware of any snowflake effect stacks having particular problems with my themes in the past. But as always, each one is unique and there are certainly going to be some that work better than others.
As a quick test, I Googled ‘jquery snowflake effect’ and this was the first result: http://www.schillmania.com/projects/snowstorm/
I put the Javascript code inside my free Builder stack, applied Ocean theme to the project and previewed the page. Things turned distinctly chilly and there were definitely a few flakes of snow drifting around on parts of the page! However some of the snow flakes were drifting under the main theme content container and weren’t fully visible until they reached the footer again. Gradually I got an accumulation of snow in the footer.
I don’t want to hi-jack this announcement thread, but typically these snowflake effects are not ideal from a performance or usability perspective IMO. Lots of things moving and layering over your content. If the developer can update it so it only takes effect on a particular page element (like a banner or ExtraContent area) it might work a lot more reliably and still give you the effect you were after.
I guess the stack is just broken. I bought several stacks by RWtuts, which caused different problems while working with them. Of course I’ve sent a ticket describing the problems, got the answer that probably the theme or other stacks may cause the problems. Later I investigated those problematic stacks by myself and noticed for most of them being pretty buggy… Even though I informed him about this I neither got an answer nor saw any update for the stacks, so I fixed them by myself.
Hi Will,
Thank you for replying to my post. I haven’t submitted any support ticket to you, only to RWtuts but just wanted to put out there the problems I’m seeing with a lot of the themes I’ve purchased and wondering if anyone else has encountered similar problems. I’m not very (if at all) technical so don’t understand about jQuery or the ordering of CSS or Javascript but can understand how the various components of themes and stacks can interfere with one another.
FYI regarding the emojis and heavy snowflakes…If a theme didn’t work with an emoji that looked like a snowflake, you can try regular non-emoji snowflakes of which "heavy’ was one choice in the stack.
Interesting what you did with your Ocean theme. I may give that a try. I had no idea that these snowflake effects came and went and usually weren’t very compatible with different themes. Again, thank you for your insight.
