New Plugin – Outlook

Hi guys,
as you might have read already, the WWO forecast page is useless to all users who began using the template after March 2016. I knew there needs to be some replacement for it.

However, I decided to go a step further and developed a new plugin, which I am sure you will like. Think about it as sort of a central place to see what is coming. I personally really like it and I am also quite pleased with the features I was able to add compared to what I developed last year (in the backend for example, the WWO page throws hundreds of notices and errors… which you probably do not even know :D)

I called it simply “outlook”. It is divided into several sections, so let me just go through all the features quick:

Sections

– Current conditions – this tab simply shows you current conditions from your station as well as from the nearby airport
– Alerts – if there are any alerts issued they will show up as a new tab
– Short-term forecast – 48h forecast with interactive graphs, tables etc.
– Long-term forecast – 7-day detailed forecast with interactive graphs, tables etc.
– Station averages – detailed graphs and tables of the average values for the upcoming days based on history data from your station
– Station extremes – detailed statistics of the extreme values measured in the upcoming days of the year based on your station history
– Almanac – sunrise and sunset times, Moon phase, day/night length for the upcoming days. Also, if any of this is about to come, it will also show up including details and exact time of occurance: main Moon phase transition (quarter, New Moon, Full Moon), lunar eclipse, solar eclipse, season change (solstice, equinox)

General features

– fully localized – including the text forecast, you can choose from over 25 languages
– fully responsive – built using blocks, should display perfectly on smaller screens with possibility to resize graphs by dragging
– graphs are interactive and resizable directly in the browser
– sortable tables with sparkline graphs
– data is cached so after you load it once it should then reload immediately
– Moon icons and season icons adjust based on your hemisphere
– possibility to highlight particular year´s data in the station extremes
– collapsable – i.e. no infinite scrolling
– error handling in case of data is N/A
– icons in graphs, including weather conditions and wind direction arrows

There is really LOT of info, so the best thing to do is to simply have a look and play around with it.

Just couple of extra points to note:

• some of the data uses the Darksky API, you will need an API key for it (free), follow instructions in the Plugin setup
• the station data is cached for 12 hours, however you can hit refresh and refresh the cache at any time. The forecast is updated every 15 minutes and cannot be updated directly from the page because we need to make sure we do not exceed the quota for the free API number of calls
• the Alerts tab sometimes does not show all the alerts (due to various data sources). For this reason, if there are no alerts issued, instead of saying “No alerts”, it will completely disappear to make sure we do not mislead the user.
• this page will replace the WWO page and will become part of the core template in Meteotemplate 10.0

DEMO