deformed-offering

Free Weather Website Templates

They're free, but use at your own risk

The scripts referenced here are used in the operation of this weather station, and may be freely copied and used to support your station. Please note that you use these scripts at your own risk. No warranty is expressed or implied. I accept no liability for any damages that may ensue from their use.
You will need to configure them for your own particular weather station website.
RSS feed for Scripts Updates A RSS Feed is available to help keep you informed on updates to the scripts.

Many of these scripts are now available on GitHub at https://github.com/ktrue

Buy Me A Coffee If you find one or more of the scripts useful to you, please consider making a donation to help offset the routine expenses of operation of this website.
Thanks for your kind support!

A Version History is available -- check back from time to time to see if there are updates to scripts you have downloaded earlier. Announcements of version updates and new scripts are made on WXForum.net and Weather-Watch forums and saratogaWXPHP Twitter account as they become available.

Note: Twitter widget has been disabled 3-Jul-2023 since it no longer displays the recent update Tweets.

This page was updated Tuesday, 10-Jan-2023 3:12 PM

How to upgrade from V2 WD to V3 WD template

Over 500 websites were based on the V2 Weather-Display/AJAX/PHP website templates, and support for the V2 templates was discontinued with the release of the V3 template set on 27-Jan-2011. But... all is not lost, and by using these instructions, you can (hopefully) easily update your V2 template to V3, preserve your customizations, and then make use of the updates utility to keep your website up-to-date.

The V2 templates for Weather-Display came in 5 versions: USA, Canada, World, Canada-ML and World-ML. The V3 templates come in 3 basic versions: USA, Canada, and World, and all versions are multilingual capable (but only the Canada and World versions have multilingual functions and scripts enabled).

Why upgrade WD/AJAX/PHP V2 to V3?

Primarily because the older V2 template set and support scripts have not been updated since the release of V3 on 27-Jan-2011, and all updates are now only being released for the V3 templates. After you upgrade to V3, then you can use the updates utility to easily keep your site and template scripts current with the latest releases. The websites that provide data for some of the support scripts are subject to changes that may render the older scripts inoperative over time, so it is importent to enable your site to use the changed support scripts as they are released -- you can not easily do that if you keep with your current V2 template set.

Key changes in the V3 templates

  • The V3 templates share the same overall wx*.php page structure as the V2 templates, but add multilingual capability to all three Base template sets. You can continue to use custom wx....php pages you have created and add multilingual functions to those pages if you like.
  • The V3 templates have distinct settings files - the new Settings.php controls the overall website and support scripts, the new Settings-weather.php file contains weather-station software specific settings. This allows you to easily change to use different supported weather software to drive your site by simply installing and configuring a new Plugin for the new weather software.
    Note: Weather-Display continues to provide the most robust assortment of weather variables tags, so switching to a different Plugin may result in reduced display functionality due to reduced weather tags provided by the specific weather software. The other weather software Plugins attempt to compensate for reduced tags by providing functions/calculations to create as many weather variables as possible, but still limited by what the basic weather software provides in weather tags variables.
  • The V3 template support scripts have been updated for multilingual capability where possible. The USA-specific scripts for radar, forecast, advisories remain English-only as the source websites are English only. The Canada-specific scripts for radar and forecast/advisory are English or French based on the two languages provided by Environment Canada. The World scripts for forecast and advisory are multilingual and rely on the translations provided by the source websites (Weather Underground and METEOalarm).

Preparations before you upgrade

  1. Make sure your current website is running PHP 7 or PHP 8 -- some of the support scripts will not work with PHP 5.6 or earlier.
  2. Make sure your current website PHP has allow_url_fopen enabled (a statement in php.ini of allow_url_fopen = on; is sufficient)
  3. Make a local backup of your current V2 website including all .php, .txt, .js, .html files
  4. Create and download a customized .ZIP file with all the files needed from the upgrade-V2 page. Print the output of the upgrade-V2 page for later reference. It will be helpful to note on the printout as you modify the new versions with your customizations from your existing V2 template set.
  5. Unzip the upgrade file into a NEW working directory on your local system, and preserve the directory structure in the .zip file.

Update the NEW pages with your customizations

  1. Edit the following pages in your NEW working directory on your local system, and transfer your changes from your existing pages in your current V2 template.
    • top.php
    • header.php
    • menubar.php
    • footer.php
    • wx*.php files that are to be replaced.
    • wxabout-*.html files that are to be replaced
    • language-*.txt files that are to be replaced
    When finished with editing each file, save the file in the NEW working directory.
  2. View your OLD Settings.php and edit NEW Settings.php and NEW Settings-weather.php files to transfer corresponding settings from the OLD to the NEW files. Note that the NEW Settings.php is reformatted and contains only station/locale specific settings while the NEW Settings-weather.php contains weather-station specific settings. When finished, save your NEW Settings.php and Settings-weather.php in the NEW working directory.
  3. You can use your old flyout-menu.xml if you like, although some conditional items have been added to the V3 flyout-menu.xml to enable/disable some stock pages based on weather station software. The lines in the NEW flyout-menu.xml have wxonly="..." in them ,, feel free to add/modify the corresponding lines to your current flyout-menu.xml, and when finished, delete the flyout-menu.xml in your NEW directory so it will not overwrite your current flyout-menu.xml when the installation is finished.
  4. If your NEW directory contains subdirectories of ajax-images/, cache/, alert-images/, WX-template-files/, then copy the directories to your current website template home directory, and upload all the new directories/files to your website while preserving the directory structure.
  5. A new version of the testtags.txt template file (1.07 - 23-Jul-2011) is included in your Upgrade .ZIP file. It provides support for the following addon scripts:
    • WebsterWeather:
      Alt-Dashboard 4.xx Script (Pre-Rainer's JavaScript) V4.30 18-FEB-2011
      Alt-Dashboard 5.xx Script V5.20 18-FEB-2011
      UpdatedAlt-Dashboard 6.xx Script V6.20 27-JUN-2011
      UpdatedMOBILE Dashboard 1.xx Script V1.30 15-JUL-2011
      High/Low/Averages Script Ver 3 Ajax-PHP Template Only V3.01 25-MAR-2011
    • 642weather (MChallis)
      Printable Flyer Add-on for WD/PHP/AJAX Website Template V1.12 06-Nov-2009
    • Eastmasonville
      Station Records (wxrecords) V1.13 - 24-May-2011
    • Relayweather
      Temperature and Rain Trending (wxglobalwarming) V1.0 20-Jan-2010

    Install the V1.07 testtags.txt if you have an older unmodified version, or an older version that was modified to include one or more of the supported scripts above. To implement, just copy the testtags.txt to your Weather-Display c:\wdisplay\webfiles directory.

Implement the V3 changes

  1. Make sure you have a local copy of your OLD V2 website.
  2. Copy the entire contents of the NEW directory (including all subdirectories) over the directory containing your OLD website, and allow all the files to be replaced.
  3. If your FTP client offers a 'upload changed files', then use it to upload all the changed files to your website. Otherwise, you'll need to manually select and upload all the changed files yourself.

Checking the V3 upgrade

  1. Use your browser to view every page on your site and look for any unexpected results (PHP error messages, data missing, etc. )
  2. Make any changes needed to address the unexpected results by editing your website pages.

Congratulations .. your upgrade is now completed and you can now use the updates page to maintain your website in the future. Please let me know that you have completed your upgrade so I can change your link in the Template Website List page to show you are using the V3 template set.

deformed-offering