I am working with the owners of a blog who provide a news service to a resort island in the southern henisphere, and part of hteir requirements was a weather update on the top of their blog.
This is the first time I have been called upon to do this, so I though I would share my findings with you lot.
Weather Services
There are a number of weather services out there who coallate reports and make them available as web services. Â This seemed the best bet, plugin to one of these services and use their data.
The eventual service I chose was http://www.accuweather.com/
Match Weather Services with a plugin
Once I had selected my weather service, the next step was to either write some code to pull in the data from Accuweather or to find a plugin that did it already. Â I’m all for not re-inventing the wheel, and I found a number of plugins that used Accuweather. Â I finally selected wp-forecast http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-forecast/
I chose this because it had the ability to code the weather into the theme through php calls along with widgets. Â The level of data provided was very good, and it looked great on my clients site.
Configuration
WP_forecast is a fairly simple thing to use, install it in the normal plugin fashion, then retrieve your location from Accuweather. Â It will come in a format similar to this:
EUR|UK|UK179|NEWCASTLE|
I simply searched on the homepage for my city, and this code was appended to the end of the URL, a quick cut and paste, and I had weather for cold old Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
There is a lot of data to add from temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity and loads more. Â A very thorough service.
The Current Eeather In Sunny Newcastle UK Is:
I installed wp-forecast on my blog and screen captured a view of the widget so you can see what it looks like
And That’s The Weather For Today
Having a weather forecast may not be everyone’s thing, but if your blog is the front end for a bricks and mortar site, where people come and do things (can I be more vague) then this may be for you.