WeatherHarvest

Background

WeatherHarvest is a PHP based module/block combination that is written for PHPNuke. This BETA is early development of a weather harvesting tool that provides "value add" to your site by presenting weather conditions throughout the US. Future releases will include Canada, Europe and Austrailia.

Weather is harvested from a variety of locations, but for the initial BETA releases it is limited to the NOAA database servers. This is consistent with other popular weather tools such as HAMWeather. Future "harvesting" will come from governmental and UN based weather gathering servers throughout the world. The reason for this approach? The data is freely available!

WeatherHarvest v0.9.5

What's New?

I no longer consider this BETA - we've come a long way. Although it isn't v1.0, yet, it's got a lot of stuff. I pretty much will bet it has more power than packages costing you $75.00 or more! I will always post updates to the databases, and more versions of this great product are in the works. Even though there is a lot in this release, there is a lot missing!

Bugs fixed

• Buffer overflow in date/time parse routine. Caused the date and time to display incorrectly.

Countries added

• Israel
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Thailand
• Malaysia
• Vietnam
• Cambodia
• Germany

WeatherHarvest Initialization updated to include

• Extended Forecast Links
• Limit on muber of days displayed for Extended Forecasts
• If you try to upgrade, remember your root paths!!!

Database Management hads been added

• Database ADD, DELETE, UPDATE for Weather Stations
• More to come!!!

• Country - you select from a list!
• Region - this can be a state, province, etc. How you want to split up a large country
• Reporting Station - this is typically the city you wat to display
• METAR Code - Retrieve these from NOAA
• FIPS - A little harder to describe, but for the US it's how the government identifies areas of the country. You can get lists of these from NOAA, but I'd recommend you look through the database as it is. Finding a city close to one already entered will work for fips codes. Oh, these give you the extended forecast!
• Primary, Secondary radar - These are NOAA radar codes. Get them from NOAA
• User Radar - This is any palce that has weather images on the web. Caveat - don't even try weather.com - they will block you in a second! There are plenty of places you can get more radar graphics, you just have to research!

Extended forecasts for Marine areas. The Ocean and Coastline are covered, and there are more I am adding. Although I didn't get the BOUY block in this release, it's coming. In researching the ways I can retrieve the Marine forecasts, I realized I had made a mistake in coding the block for buoys, so back to the drawing board - please be patient!

Finally, there is extended forecasts link control for your block!

WeatherHarvest BETA v0.8.5

What's New?

Believe it or not, we are nearing the 1.0 PROD release. Although this add-on is very stable, until all of the great features I think need to be there for the BIG 1.0 release, we just aren't PROD in my book yet!

Anyway, here's what your going to find in this little release. Almost all of the features are for the ADMIN, they will provide your signed-in users a little more flexibility.

• BLOCK Layout Manager - Just about complete!
  • Time Format - In the last version, I strugled with layout options for the Time/Date format. So, it's now split out.
  • Date Format - ditto to Time Format
  • Year Format - Basically, a four digit year or two digit year.
  • Display Timezone - Until I really get a solid ideam on GMT to your local time, I left in the timezone feature from your HOST location
  • Timestamp Position - Where in the block do you want the timestamp?
  • Show Region
  • Show Country
  • Block Width - Here's the first attempt to put the block on a diet - either normal or slim!
  • Display Measurement - I saw requests for this, so you get it Metric, Standard (for us Imperialists!), or BOTH
  • Radar, Station, and Summary Link - Basically the same links you find under the WeatherHarvest site links, just now you can choose to place them in the block.
  • DAWN and DUSK entry - This allows you to show the right ICON for the time of day in your neck of the woods.
• More Countries!
  • Iraq - although not reporting right now, trying to get for someone going to IRAQ for their family.
  • Belgium
  • France
  • Columbia
  • Australia
  • More to come - check www.ibdeeming.com forums

The nuke_weatherblock table changed, so the one you have will be wiped out. Other than these listed changes, there were just some minor coding faux-pas that were corrected. If you didn't see them - don't ask!

WeatherHarvest BETA v0.8.0

What's new?

For only giving this release a 0.1 addition - I've got to review my versioning scheme! There's a lot of new stuff!

• fixed date routine in block
• added United Kingdom, Egypt, China, Afghanistan, Albania, United Arab Emerites, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia
• Added additional radar selections for NOAA radars
• Capitalized countries, regions and reporting stations
• Beginning of full featured block layout manager
• Support for Countries that don't have a region (broken into states or provinces, etc.)

WeatherHarvest BETA v0.7.0

What's new?

Now that I've gotten over killing databases, I've gotten down to some real data collection and a few bugs.

• Fixed parsing errors in index.php
• Added NOAA BUOY Marine Data for the WORLD! (HUGE addition, pretty cool) There is an initialization table upgrade from 0.5.0 to 0.7.0
• Added Weather Summaries - NOAA lists summaries for selected cities throughout the world. This simple routine allows you to see the collected data for those specified regions
• Added Canada to the list of weather cities. No radar yet, but it is coming!

WeatherHarvest BETA v0.5.0

What's new?

This release wasn't what it was supposed to be. Your humble (whatever) coder screwed up the database trying to do too much. I ahve spent the last 2 1/2 weeks getting it back together. There are a couple of new things that you'll want though -

• Radars have been harvested for all of the major cities. More will be added
• Fixed issues when saving INI data
• Fixed invalid math routines for temperatures below 0C or 32F
• Fixed parsing routine for temperatures below 0C or 32F and DEW Point measures that are negative

Installation Instructions

Power users - if you want to upgrade - you can!

• If you have successfully installed BETA 0.4.0, you may apply WHUpgrade0-4to0-5.sql.
• If you have successfully installed BETA 0.5.0 you may apply WHUpgrade0-5to0.7.sql.
• If you have successfully installed BETA 0.7.0 you may apply WHUpgrade0-7to0-8.sql.
• If you have successfully installed BETA 0.8.0 you may apply WHUpgrade0-8to0-8-5.sql.
• Although I have an upgrade path for 0.9.5 - it's pretty much a refresh of a few tables. If you have a working copy of BETA 0.8.5 running - apply WHUpgrade0-8-5to0-9-5.sql. You MUST also apply WeatherHarvestMORE0-9-5.sql due to table changes! NOTE - When v1.0 is released, the upgrades start over!!!

Just to be SAFE! The zip file provided is based on a directory structure "/www/phpnuke6.5/...". This is what the development machine is. Future PROD zips will start from "html" under your particular PHPNuke version.

Steps to success:

• Unzip and copy files to their correct locations in your PHPNuke site
• CHMOD the "modules/WeatherHarvest/cache" directory to 777
• Apply the WeatherHarvest0-9-5.sql file AND WeatherHarvestMORE0-9-5.sql, now located in the /www/phpnuke6.5/sql directory. It is applied through the mySQL command line or through an admin tool such as phpMyAdmin. This file will wipe old databases, and create new ones.
• IMPORTANT: Before activating your block and module, you must go through your admin panel and set up your defaults in the initialization table. All paths are based on "root" and must have a trailing '/' You'll receive errors if they are entered wrong. Your cache paths from "root" should all be the same. If you are a power user, you can set up a seperate cache path for radar images.
  • Note: Cache timeout is for cleanup and regeneration of data files. NOAA typically updates every 30 minutes unless a significant event is taking place.
  • HTTP protocol is the preferred. If you choose FTP, you could experience a "slow" site. I give you the lodaed gun - use it wisely!
• Once you have successfully saved your initialization data, activate your block and module. You may place the module in your "links" block, as it now has menu options for users.
• At this time, you may want to set up your default site city. You perform this through the admin panel.

A quick note about root paths Keep in mind that the root path of an Operating System and the root path of PHPNuke are very different things. When trying to find the root path of your hosting Operating System, you need to telnet to the system, change directories to '/' ('\' for Windows systems), and then progress until you are back at your sites home directory. The root directory of your PHPNuke install will minimally be the home directory of your site (where you are when you first log-in to your telnet session). I know this can be confusing, and it's certainly not easy to explain - but it makes a HUGE difference in your ability to read/write to various directories in your site path.

BUG Reports and Wish lists

Let me know what's going on! Use the forum at www.ibdeeming.com to report all issues or make suggestions. Anyone who's worked with me in the past knows I'm pretty wide open!

What's Next

I have begun the design and initial work on the following:

• Looping Radar
• WeatherHarvest Block ADMIN - extended to be smart enough to know if your block in center or side!
• More radar images in the database - they're not all there because it's a manual entry process, and very boring!
• Admin functions for the weather stations
• Zip code support
• Weather forecasts

THANKS!

Thanks for using this "add-on" I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoy making it!