collective.weather

Life, the Universe, and Everything

A Plone package to display the current weather at selected locations inside a portlet or viewlet.

Mostly Harmless

Got an idea? Found a bug? Let us know by opening a support ticket.

Don't Panic

Installation

To enable this package on a buildout-based installation:

1. Edit your buildout.cfg and add collective.weather to the list of eggs to install:

   [buildout]
   ...
   eggs =
       collective.weather
   

2. If you are using Plone 4.1, you may need to extend a Dexterity known good set (KGS) to make sure that you get the right versions of the packages that make up Dexterity:

   [buildout]
   ...
   extends =
       https://good-py.appspot.com/release/dexterity/1.2.1?plone=4.1.6
   

After updating the configuration you need to run ''bin/buildout'', which will take care of updating your system.

Go to the 'Site Setup' page in a Plone site and click on the 'Add-ons' link.

Check the box next to ''collective.weather'' and click the 'Activate' button.

Usage

Go to Site Setup and select 'Weather'.

Enter the list of locations that are going to be available on the site in the following format:

location_id|name

Where location_id should be a unique value and not repeated among any of the locations; name is the name to be shown in the drop down (this doesn't need to be unique). Some examples could be:

455827|São Paulo (for Yahoo! Weather)
-23.548871,-46.638814|São Paulo (for Forecast.io and Weather Underground)

Select the sistem of units: Metric or Imperial. Metric system uses degrees Celsius. Imperial system uses degrees Fahrenheit.

Finding locations

Different weather service providers need different location ids to get weather conditions.

You'll have to change the Available locations setting depending on your selection. Please, refer to providers documentation for more information:

• Yahoo Weather needs a WOEID. There's a convenient online tool to get WOEID.
• Forecast.io API just needs a latitude, longitude coordinate.
• Weather Underground accepts many options (check the query option).

Portlet

The package includes a portlet that you can add in your site.

• Open the 'Manage portlets' screen and select 'Weather portlet'
• Set the title of the portlet
• Select a city from the list

Viewlet

The package also includes a viewlet that will display the weather in one of the locations defined in the settings. The viewlet will be displayed on top of the site inside the IPortalHeader viewlet manager.

To use the viewlet you need to activate it: go to Site Setup and select 'Weather' again. Select the 'Show weather viewlet?' box.

The user will be able to select from one of the locations (this information will be stored inside a cookie to show this location the next time the user visits the site).

The current weather condition of the selected location will be displayed at the viewlet.

Internals

The weather viewlet uses Javascript in order to change cities, so this will only work for Javascript enabled browsers.

To render the city weather, there is a "current-weather" view that will render the latest info it has on weather conditions for a given city. A cookie is used to get the latest chosen city, and you can override it by passing a "city" argument to the view.

To update the city weather, there is a "update-weather", that, when called without parameters, it will update all cities from the list. You can pass a "city" argument to the view, to only update the given city.

There's an internal cache for each city (30 minutes), that if not enough time has passed, then it will assume the current weather is updated, and it will not do anything.

The Javascript that changes the city, will call this "update-weather" for the chosen city to update it first. Thanks to this internal cache, this view will return fast, if not enough time has passed.

In order to make it really fast for visitors of your site, you can set-up a clockserver job to call this "update-weather" view with no params, once every 30 minutes, so weather information for all your cities are ready for when the visitor changes it from the drop-down.

Extending the package with new weather providers

In case you want to contribute with new weather providers for this package or if you want to add a new one in a custom package for your site you'll just need to create a new named utility that should implement collective.weather.interfaces.IWeatherInfo.

Weather control panel will automatically learn about the new utility and it will be listed as an option in the provider's drop-down.

This package already comes with some utilities you can check to get a quick idea of how to create yours:

• yahoo
• forecast.io
• wunderground

The API for this utility is very simple.

In case your utility needs an API key you can pass it on initialization.

Here's and example you can copy and paste to start your custom utility:

"""Example of a named utility for IWeatherInfo.
"""
from collective.weather.interfaces import IWeatherInfo
from zope.interface import implements


class DummyProvider(object):
    """Dummy weather implementation of IWeatherInfo
    """
    implements(IWeatherInfo)

    def __init__(self, key=None):
        self.key = key

    def getWeatherInfo(self, location, units='metric', lang='en'):
        """Dummy implementation of getWeatherInfo as an example
        """
        return {
            'summary': u'What a lovely day!',
            'temperature': 20,
            'icon': u'lovely-day-icon.png',
        }

Not entirely unlike

Weather Forecast

A very old an unmaintained product, Weather Forecast is a portlet that will display the observation of the weather. Compatible with Plone 2.5.