Get updated weather forecast information on your Joomla website with the Weather GK4 module
The Weather GK4 module presents real-time weather information from two sources: Google and Yahoo. Here is an example of the module’s information display:
Important! Since 1.6 version we have dropped support for Google Weather as a data source because lot of problems caused by feed unavailability. With new version all translations can be made via language file (root/languages/en-GB/en-GB.mod_weather_gk4.ini).
This module contains four groups of options:
Options Group – ‘BASIC SETTINGS’
The suffix and ID of the module is set here. As this module does not contain any other scripts, there is no risk of conflict which could result when two modules have been assigned the same ID. A module’s ID may be used to style instances of the module in a unique way.
‘GENERAL SETTINGS’
Full City Name – Enter the full name of a city here.
Time Offset and Timezone – Use these options to define the time zone and to select the offset, or time differential, between the target city daylight savings time (DST) value with that of the Google data source. An additional option here is used to set the time at which the day and night icons are displayed.
WOEID – Unlike the Google data source, Yahoo uses their GeoPlanet service to identify a location. GeoPlanet generates a ‘Where On Earth ID’, or WOEID, to identify locations on Earth. To generate a WOEID for your location, follow this WOEID generator link. (To learn more about the WOEID, see here.)
Use Yahoo! Icons – Set whether to exclusively use icons shared by Yahoo!
Options Group – ‘LAYOUT’
Layout – Set where the weather forecast graph will be displayed.
For the remaining options, set the ‘ON/OFF’ switches to include or exclude specified data elements the module will display.
The final group of options concerns the use of external data:
Options Group – ‘EXTERNAL FILES’
Use Module CSS – Set to ‘ON’ or ‘OFF’ according to whether a module is supported by the current template. For example, if the template does not inherently support the module (the look of the module display does not conform to that of the template), then you would set this to ‘ON’ and the module’s CSS could be used to more closely match the look of the template.
Use Cache and Cache Time – These settings are important. This module downloads its data in real-time from an external server. This can take a few seconds to complete and could delay loading of the page and the module. Using the cache, data may be loaded in a more efficient manner to accelerate page and module loading.
Note that too many concurrent requests to Google or Yahoo could result in your site being temporarily banned from their sites. There is increased risk of this happening when cache is not being used and your site processes many Google or Yahoo visits in parallel. In this scenario, the Weather GK4 module may return with no results to display to site visitors.
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