New plugin – Country Climate

A new plugin is now available, which I have been working on for quite some time and which shows you various interesting trends and data for climate grouped by countries.

The plugin uses lot of aggregated data and using graphs, tables and visualizations you can easily look at for example temperature trends in the last century, what the wettest decade was etc. All the data is based on the period between 1900 and 2012. It is actually quite interesting to see for example how the temperature range changed over the century for particular months (easily seen using the heatmaps), what the trends were, what were the maximum/minimum temperatures, what are the averages etc etc. There is definitely a lot of info and I hope you will find it interesting. I also optimized the script so despite the fact it contains tens of interactive tables and graphs, it still loads quite fast.

All the calculations require six additional mySQL tables which you must create. But do not worry, there is a script which does all this automatically. Once you have all your tables created it should work without any further setting up required.

Features:

• climate data for over 200 countries
• temperature, precipitation, cloudiness and potential evapotranspiration trends, values etc. grouped by years, decades and overall trends
• can easily be translated, right now an English and French (thanks Jean) versions are available

Installation:

1. Download and extract the zip file.
2. Use a text editor to open index.php. Right at the top you will see two parameters to be set up. This is to set the country which will be loaded by default. The first parameter is an ISO-3 code of your country, the ID then corresponds to ISO-2 code. Once you have this changed, save the changes and close the file.
3. Now upload the entire directory to your plugins directory. Some of the files are over 2MB large, but do not worry, those are the data files and you will always be loading just data for one country so the page actually loads pretty fast.
4. Before you now do anything, the first page you must open is the install.php. But you must also provide your admin password so that no-one else can create tables for you…. In your browser therefore type the following address: …… plugins directory/countryClimate/install.php?password=12345 where the password corresponds to your adminPassword set in config.php.
5. You should now see a page, which explains what to do, but basically all you have to do is click on each of the six links one by one. Each link creates on of the six required mySQL table. Make sure that once you click the link, you wait until the page stops loading. You might see a blank screen, but if the page is still loading, it means that data is still being transfered to the table. The time required depends on the speed of your server. Once it stops loading, close the window/tab and continue until you create all the six tables.
6. Now you are ready to go. Try the index.php and your plugin should now be working and all that is left to do is add a link to your menu.

DEMO
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