The Jellyfish Counter plugin provides a widget and shortcode enabling you to easily add animated counters to your WordPress site.
Counters can be used as a manually updated total, an automatic counter that updates over time or just as an animated visual effect. Each counter can count upwards or downwards making them suitable for both incrementing totals or countdown situations. A great visual effect for travel blogs or any website that wants to display a running total or countdown of anything.
Jellyfish Counters are highly configurable through the widget interface, and being generated using CSS and JavaScript, they require no external graphics files. You may have as many counters as you wish on a page, all can have individual settings for totals and appearance.
Shortcode support allows you to generate a counter directly within any post or page content making counters no longer limited to your sidebar or other widgetable area.
Advanced users will find that Jellyfish Counter objects are fully accessible via JavaScript and may be controlled and reconfigured as desired though your own custom scripting.
Demo
Check out the plugin homepage for demos and further information: http://strawberryjellyfish.com/wordpress-plugins/jellyfish-counter/
Usage
Widget
Simply drag a counter widget to your sidebar and adjust the settings to suit your needs.
There are three basic modes of operation:
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Static — If you want the counter to simply display a non animated number just set a Start Value to the desired number for the counter and set the Counter Type to ‘static’
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Animated – If you supply both start value and end value in the widget, the counter will increment upwards or downwards depending on the chosen Counter Type until it reaches the end value. Speed of the count is controlled by the Animation Speed option. Note, this counter has no memory, it will reset when a page is reloaded or changed but it is great for a visual effect where start and end values are relatively close together.
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Continuous – If you want to count over a long period of time and need your counter to continue to count irrespective of page loads then just select the continuous option in the widget. Then choose the interval between the counter increments, in seconds. As soon as you save the widget the counter will «start» and will continue to tick away even if nobody is viewing your blog. Changing the setting on an active continuous counter will not effect the count value and it will keep count, if you wish to reset an active continuous counter just change the start value and save the widget and the counter will restart from the new starting value. Note: In continuous mode, animation speed and display tenths have no effect.
The counters are very configurable through the widget panel. You can define the digit height, width and font as well as animation speed (animated mode only) and «bustedness» (odometer style misalignment of the digits).
You can further customise the appearance of an individual counter via the «Digit Style» input that will accept a valid CSS style attributes such as font-family, colour, background etc.
Note: the size of the font here as is automatically calculated from the height, width and padding settings.
Need a flat looking counter? «Disable 3D effect» removes the CSS shading effect.
If you want to display a prefix on the counter or include separating characters, use the Format input. Just enter a string here representing your desired counter appearance, a 0 represents a counter digit, any other character will be displayed as it is. The Format option overrides the number of digits option, if a format string exists then the counter will use the total number of 0 characters as the number of digits.
Example Formats:
$0.00
1,000,000
0000 km
Shortcode
You can generate a counter directly within page or post content using the [jellyfish_counter] shortcode. The shortcode accepts a full range of parameters to provide identical functionality to the widget version.
The following parameters may be used within a shortcode:
- digits : a number, Number of digits in the counter
- format : a string, representing any fancy display format
- tenths : true/false, display tenths digit or not
- digit_height : number, pixel height of digits
- digit_width : number, pixel width of digits
- digit_padding : number, pixel padding for digits
- digit_style : a string, custom css styles for the digits
- alignment : ‘left’, ‘center’, ‘right’, ‘inline’ overall counter alignment
- bustedness : a number, misalignment of digits
- flat : true/false, don’t show 3d effect, show 3d effect
- speed : a number, 0 — 100, animation speed
- start : a number, starting value for the counter
- end : a number, ending value for the counter
- direction : a, string ‘up’ or ‘down’
- interval : The number of seconds between updates of a continuous counter
- tick_multiplier : the number of units the counter will increment every interval (defaults to 1)
- timestamp : false or a string representing the starting time for the counter
If you don’t specify a parameter it’s default value will be used.
Examples:
[jellyfish_counter end=100]
The above shortcode translates as: Display a counter that animates upwards from 0 to 100
[jellyfish_counter start=999 end=0 direction=»down» digit_style=»background: transparent; color: red;» flat=true; timestamp=»2014-09-28 9:20:21″ interval=300 ]
The above shortcode translates as: Display a counter that starts at 999 and ends at 0, counting downwards. It has red digits on a transparent background with no 3D shading effect. It is a persistent counter that started counting at 9:20:21 on 2014-09-28 and has been decrementing by one every 300 seconds (5 minutes) since then.
Styling
You can modify the appearance of an individual counters text through the widget control panel or through shortcode parameters. This should be sufficient for most uses.
However, if you need to globally override the default counter style or make other CSS changes to the counter digits or container, take a look at jellyfish-counter.css for the appropriate class names. You should override this in you theme rather than modifying this css file as any changes made would be lost when the plugin upgrades..