Welcome Announcement

What it does

This plugin displays a welcome announcement when a visitor enters your blog. The announcement is shown over a transparent veil with an appearance effect, displayed for the defined duration and then taken offscreen with a disappearance effect. The plugin supports announcement in flash format (swf) and standard HTML announcement.

The plugin is packaged with a default animation (wa_demo.swf) animating a customizable text. Upon installation, the default announcement message is ?Welcome to [your-blog-name]?. You can of course edit it to your needs.

An HTML announcement can be defined and supports all standard HTML tags, including text and images. There is wysiwyg editor in the administration panel to help you design it. If you fancy rich content, you can also add it.

For convenience, your visitors will see your announcement only once, at the frequency you define. A cookie is set with your specified expiration date and returning visitors won?t see the welcome message again before the cookie expires.

The announcement is shown on any page, as long as the visitor has not yet seen it. It is very useful if people are redirected to your articles / pages from other blogs or search engines. It has been testes on Internet Explorer 6+ and Firefox 3+.

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To view a demo of the plugin, open The demo and disucssion page.

*Features: *

• Welcome announcement in Flash animation or static (HTML format)
• You can dynamically pass parameters to your flash file
• If you choose the flash format, you can provide an alternate content in case the visitor doesn?t have flash installed in his browser.
• You can temporarily enable or disable the welcome announcement
• You can style the announcement: dimensions and background color. Further customization is possible via the provided CSS file.
• You can style the veil: background color and transparency. Further customization is possible via the provided CSS file.
• You can completely set up the animation flow: appearance phase duration and effects, display phase duration, and disappearance phase duration and effects. About 20 effects are proposed for appearance and disappearance, ranging from simple show and slide to stunning infinite zoom or explosion.
• You can set cookie parameters: name and expiration.
• A fully fledged configuration page where you can completely set up your welcome announcement. Detailed description of each parameter and visual aids like wysiwyg text editors or color selectors.

Tags

Welcome announcement, Flash, animation, static, HTML, flash parameters, flash vars, alternate content, style, opacity, transparency, flow, effects, fx, appearance, disappearance, cookie, cross-browser, cross-platform, IE, Internet explorer, Firefox.

Installation and Configuration

Installation is very easy.

1. Download the package here:
2. Unzip it
3. Upload the folder to your WordPress site in the plugins folder: /wp-content/plugins
4. Log in to your WordPress admin page, go to the plugins menu and activate welcome.
5. That?s it , you have a functional welcome announcement.
6. You can open you WordPress blog to see how the default animation looks.

If you are updating from an earlier version, follow steps 1, and 2 above. Then
– replace the previous files with the new ones
– Log in to your admin panel,
– Deactivate the plugin
– Activate the plugin
– That’s it for the update!

Configuration: To configure the welcome announcement, log in your WordPress administration panel and under the theme menu group, locate the link ?Welcome announcement? and click it. This opens the welcome announcement options page. Just go through the section and make your changes.

Nota: it is recommended to test the appearance of your announcement by opening your blog page. After you make modification to the plugin options, modify the cookie name to view yourself the changes.

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