Weather Sky

Preparing template

Now that you know Weather Sky's principle of operation, you could begin to edit it for your own needs. I've keep it very short and simple! Let's begin with the Site Name in the header and it's slogan

Header website name

Weather Sky's header is the clouds picture with this text:

- Weather Sky (planned to be your website name)
- Your BEST forecast provider (your site's slogan)

In folder style, you will find a file named header.gif (the current header) and header-empty.gif, a graphic file without text. The first thing you could do is to do some "lettering" on your own header file. As with web fonts you are in some way limited in your choice (Arial, Roman, Geneva and a few others). The easiest way is to put your text directly in your header graphic. To do so, take an image editor, I suggest Paint.NET, which is an easy and powerful program (at last Windows Paint can do the job). Just as an inspiration, I've used (windows) font: Lucida Calligraphy, size: 36, italic.

Menu edition

In the Weather Sky template, menus are stored into separate files. You will find a file named: header_inc.php. This file contain upper and main menu comment like this one <!-- main menu --> it shows you where the menu begins. The MENU structure is like this:

adding items

adding an item is easy, simply insert an <li>...</li> at the location where you need it.

removing upper menu

If you don't need this menu, you could simply remove these tags <ul>...</ul> and all of the lines between them (do the same thing on the main menu if you want to remove that one as well).

Footer edition

Last thing you have to do is to modify footer_inc.php file to fit your needs. In the footer there is also a menu that you can edit or reject by following the same rules as the main menu above

You could also put your own copyright sifbature at bottom to indicate that this station is build and operated by you!

Then that's it for configuration! You could for sure, go ahead and modify any page to give your site a unique "personal touch"! Like we say... "The Sky is the limit"!!

Template installation

Now that you have prepared and configured your template, it's time to send it to your web-site. If you already have a weather template, like the Cumulus standard, you need to wipe it from your website to avoid a mix between that one and your new Weather Sky template. To install your template, you simply need to take all Weather Sky files and folders and sent them to your web site, using your prefered ftp software. .

Cumulus configuration

Now that you have your own template it's time to tell Cumulus to use it! To do so, start Cumulus and go to menu: Configuration --> Internet --> Files tab. That will bring you a screen as the one you see (partly) in the image shown below

First thing you have to do is to unselect option "Include Standard Files" as we don't want Cumulus to send its standard template as the same time as your Weather Sky template. Also, be sure to keep the option "Include Standard Images" checked as we want to use Cumulus graphs and gauges.

Now, it's time to tell Cumulus to process our unique file: wt_data_inc.php. To do this, you have to fill one line, as indicated below:

To process your template, Cumulus beed 4 informations:

• Local filename: - Name, with complete path to your wt_data_inc.php. file
• Remote filename: - URL adress to put wt_data_inc.php file.
• Process?: - To be checked to tell Cumulus that this file contains webtags to process.
• Ftp?: - Command to upload wt_data_inc.php file.

Then, for our data file we have to enter the fields in this way:

• Local filename: Take browse button to point wt_data_inc.php file.
• Remote filename: public_html/wt_data_inc.php
• Process?: Checked
• Ftp?: Checked

Note: In our example, we've show public_html for remote path as it is the most common name used in website configuration, but this could be different on your provider configuration.

Now, that all is in place, it's time to launch the Template Manager Module on your website to "initialize" you website template (eg. http://MyWeatherSite/manage.php.)

Now, Final: Template Manager Module! >>