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

[Lionel]

This hack has been working beautifully well. But now, I just got an email:
Database error in vBulletin 2.2.1:

Invalid SQL: SELECT * FROM weather_usersettings WHERE userid=0
mysql error:

I must add that I was getting the same error for another hack but that was fixed.

The sql looks good to me and the error, which just occured for the first time, happened after one week of no changes.

Do not know if I shoud blame vbulletin or what. The other observation: the error occured when I had 6 simultaneous registrations.

[Zombie]

I downloaded this hack awhile ago and just now put it on my site.

Thanks for the hack JJR512.

Just hope msnbc doesn't go down very often.

[Mohamed]

how I can make it in box on forum home like PM box
the ( $weather ) it doesn't work wiht me

thank's

[skyline2002]

thx man, it 's the most powerful function that i installed!!

[wild texas]

I recently added the weather hack to my vBulletin and what I'd like to do is save the weather box it generates to a text file for inclusion on other (non-vB) pages of my site.

I managed to get vB Weather to output the contents of the weather include file, after vB Weather has populated the weather data but just before vBulletin parses its template, to a text file. However, since the vB Weather template includes some standard vB template variables (for table background colors and such), those get saved out to the text file as the variable name, instead of being parsed and thus replaced with the proper font colors.

There's a line in vB Weather that reads:

PHP Code:

eval("\$weather = \"".gettemplate("homeindex_left_weather")."\";"); 


I thought this would give me the parsed template, but it does not.

I tried using output buffering but did not have any luck. I'm fairly new to PHP coding, though I've been tweaking stuff for awhile now.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

You can view the weather box I'm wanting to export to a text file after it's populated with data and parsed by vB for template variables by going to my forums (see left nav, towards the bottom).

Thanks!

[BigJohnson]

can someone make a vbhacker file for this plz

[Okiewan]

Tremendous hack! Being a dirtbike site.. weather is important!
Thought you might like a screen of my implementation.

I made it a js pop-up, linked as "[username]'s Weather / Forecast" in the welcome panel, and as a top link "weather" (which I use text for).

Modified so it takes advantge of the style hack as well.

Very cool, thanks for the hard work!!

[www.tourc.ca]

thanks... this is great.... worked like a charm, easy to install, and excellent documentation!

I also implemented this on my home page a little differently than was posted, and made the weather.php a javapopup, and changed the redirect to my home page but otherwise is the same as posted!

you can test it out on my site www.tourc.ca . You can log in as 'testuser' and use the same password 'testuser' to see the weather column on my home page on the left column...

Note: the weather on my site is on my site's home page not the forums home page, so click 'home'

-dave

[AnkisethGallant]

I just installed this, it's pretty cool. It took some time editing the template, but now I have it convienently docked under my welcome panel.

[wastegate]

Hi great hack! Nice work, but just one thing seems to giving me alittle greif, I hope someone can help.

1st problem is in the weather.php setings where you select your City, if the city is the first one in the region for Country it doesn't seem to goto that straight away, you have to select a different State/Country/City before it will show up.

Say for example I put in Australia/New Zealand as the region, Australia pops up as the default Country but doesn't list a subdevision/state or any citys in the city pull down, you have to then Select New Zealand then change it back to Australia for the Subdevision/State then select a different State for the Citys to show up. Little bit of an annoyance..

2nd is that I seem to be getting a database error sometimes from it. The error is as follows:

Database error in vBulletin 2.2.3:

Invalid SQL: SELECT accid,city_title FROM weather_city WHERE subdiv_id= ORDER BY city_title
mysql error: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'ORDER BY city_title' at line 1

mysql error number: 1064

Date: Friday 10th of May 2002 04:00:26 PM
Script: http://board.performanceforums.com/f...modifysettings
Referer: http://board.performanceforums.com/f...orceupdate=yes

Anyways I hope someone can help.