Time Controller for WMS layers

[Yordan Radev]

I work with the Canadian Government and am trying to push the adoption of OpenLayers, but the only thing left for us to fully adopt and promote it is a proper way to animate Timed WMS layers. Something like this in the core library that would allow to control multiple layers with multiple time steps and even synchronise them would be of great help. I would love to have methods around OGC compliant (the standard for WMSs) layers such as getStartTime, getEndTime, getTimeStepMinutes and others. I would also love to be able to pre load and cache as well as a loading flag so to make animations easier and the final thing that would absolutely blow my mind is if we can develop a way to export animations, for example a GIF of all 16 steps of a WMS Time layer. This all should be doable as the library is already so mature and well structured and most of the above I have done following the official examples and hacking my way around limitations but to implement in the official library would help so many people and would make the library so much cooler/usable.