vB Weather: Give your members current weather and forecasts!

After seeing a weather feature at the vbPortal website, and finding out that I couldn't get it for free, I determined to create it for myself, and give it away to everyone for FREE.

So here it is. It's based in part upon the original MyWeather add-on module for PHP-Nuke, which as I understand was also the basis for the add-on module for vbPortal. Anyway, I basically used the part of the PHP-Nuke module that gets the raw data and parses it into a usable format, although I reworked it some and corrected a few bugs. I wrote on my own the rest of the code which handles and displays the data, along with letting the user select his/her location (to localize the weather), number formats (like ?F or C, winds in mph or kmph, etc.), and various other little bits.

I've done as much testing on it as I can on my own, and have had it running on my own production forums for about a day now. Several people have commented that they really love the feature, that it's almost getting to the point where they don't have to go anywhere else on the Internet. I haven't heard of any complaints or problems yet, though, so I'm reasonably certain it's fit for a full release.

You can demo the hack on my message board: JJR512.com. The first part you should look at is the box that appears in the column of boxes on the left side of the home page. This box displays basic current weather info. There are two links in that box, one to see the forecast, and the other to change settings. I forget if you need to be logged in to see the forecast--it may just show you a forecast for the default location, which is Central Park, New York City, NY, USA--but you definitely need to be logged in to change settings. For the purpose of seeing this hack in action, you can login as Test User using the password testuser. Feel free to change the settings and save them, do whatever.

Installing this hack is in some ways easy, in other ways not so easy. There will only be one file modification. However, there are no specific instructions as to which file to edit or how to edit it. If you want the small weather box to show up on your forums home page, you need to edit the associated file (index.php). If you want it to show up somewhere else, then you need to edit whatever file generates the page where you want it. There is a text file in the ZIP that contains all the code, and only the code, that you need to insert into whatever file. If you prefer, you can turn that text file into a .php file (by adding <?php at the beginning and ?> at the end and renaming it to .php) and simply including it in whatever file you need it in.

You will also most likely need to edit the template that makes the weather box. It's formatted to basically make a box as it appears on my site, which is in the middle of some other boxes in a column. If you want to reformat it to appear as a long thing across the top of the page, like the various stuff at the top of the forums home page here at vbulletin.org, that's up to you. You edit the templates to match your own site.

BTW, I would appreciate it if someone better at PHP coding than myself would take a look over this and tell me if I've done everything right or not. I believe the code works and does what I want it to do, but it seems like it might be a little more complex than it needs to or should be. I guess I'm just wondering if there may have been a more efficient way to do some of the things I did. If you have any tips or advice for me, or even want to rewrite the code to show me, I'd really appreciate it.

OK, so without further ado, here's the hack in the attachment. Whatever problems you have, please post them here, and I'll try to help as best I can, but make no guarantees that I can help at all. Please remember that I write my hacks for my own site first and foremost, so they do what I need them to do, not what I think somebody else might want. I choose to release them here in case anybody else can benefit from them, but you may need some part of it to work slightly differently. If I know how to do it I will try to tell you how to do it, but I won't update the hack with every little feature variation that people ask for. In general, I only update my hacks to fix bugs and to add new features that I want or need for my site.

// Change Log]
03b: Includes necessary database change instructions.
03a: Forgot to update 03 ZIP with new templates; fixed.
03: Changed code for new icon system, added code for forecasted weather type (new part of raw data)
02: Adjusted code for new format of weather forecast raw data
01b: Fixed two missing lines from weather_include.txt
01a: Added missing template; updated instructions regarding missing template; fixed $templatesused variable in weather.php; added text file explaining how to add more cities; updated instructions regarding where to get the icons used for this hack
01: Original release

[scottct1]

Boofo this is happening to me too, hit update and the icons are back go back in again and the icons are all broken.

[JJR512]

scottc1, the problem appears to be with the data itself. I checked the raw data feed for Hartford, and it does indeed say "Flurries/ Wind". The current weather type is present in the data as plain text, and, for display, is just pulled out as plain text and stuck in the template. There's no processing going on, so whatever it says there, is what the raw data says. So, somebody at The Weather Channel screwed up, I guess! (Oh, BTW, the weather is now provided by The Weather Channel through MSNBC, no longer is it AccuWeather through MSNBC...another detail change I'll have to make later, it still says AccuWeather in the templates).

However, this plain-text current weather type may have been deprecated...As I was studying the raw data feed to figure out the new icon system, I noticed that the current weather type as displayed on MSNBC's site did not always match what the feed had in it. But there was a correlation between the current weather type and the icon itself. I believe they are now using a new system of using the icon as a reference to look up a weather type to display; in other words, if the raw data feed says to use icon 12 for the current weather icon, then the type should say "cloudy", which it figures out using a lookup table. There are a few discrepencies with this theory, but it seems to be more accurate than using the old way. I'll be studying that more.

[scottct1]

Thanks Justin for looking into that.

It's so hot here today, I wish it would snow.

[Boofo]

It's been known to do that, at least here it has in the past.

Originally posted by scottct1
It's so hot here today, I wish it would snow.

[JJR512]

OK, the issue with the icons not showing up (after going to the main page then back to detailed weather) should be fixed now. When you go to the detailed view, there's a routine that checks the cache (weather info stored in the database with your userid), and if the info there is less than two hours old, it just re-uses it. In the last update, I changed some things but did not change what gets stored in the cache, so the cache did not have the correct data in it to show you if you came back to see it.

I've uploaded another ZIP file, 03b, that has a new weather.php file that is necessary, and also a new file called "databasechanges.txt". You need to execute each of the six queries in that file. Those six queries get the weather_userdata table ready for the new weather.php to cache data into it.

[Boofo]

Great job on the fix, as usual. The icons are there to stay now. Thanks for all of the hard work and dedication to a very well put together hack.

[Boofo]

Shouldn't it auto default to New York when a new user logs on or before they are registered? This is what I get for new users. Did I miss something?

[Boofo]

This just isn't my day. My 5-day Forecast is not showing icons anymore and shows all zeros now. Even on auto-update this is happening (check the attached picture). Is anyone else having this problem?

[scottct1]

Same here this just started happening about a half hour ago, everything is running but no 5 day forecast.

I think JJR is on overtime now.

[Lionel]

that has to do with MSNBC I think