C. Configuration

Upload

After you download the package, extract it and make sure that none of the files are damaged. Starting from version 6.0, all setup is done using a graphical user interface (GUI) in your browser. First thing you need to do is obviously to upload the downloaded package to your server.

NOTE FOR LINUX APACHE SERVERS!!!

If you do not have a linux apache server, you may disregard this information. If you are not sure, read this first.
If you use Linux Apache server (also used by many webhosting providers) there will be a problem with your icons if you upload all the files directly to the server root! Unfortunately this cannot be changed even in the .htaccess file. If you want to put all template files directly in your server root, I recommend you first do the following test:

Before uploading the files, create a directory called "icons", make sure it is called "icons". Then upload any image file there. Then go to your browser and try accessing this image by entering http://www.mysite.com/icons/myimage.jpg. If you get the 404 File Not Found error it means that you will need to use an alternative procedure.

If you get the icons error, there is a simple solution. Do not upload the template files directly in the server root. Create a new folder directly in your server root and call it "template". Then, upload all the template files inside this directory. So for example the index.php will be inside: http://www.mysite.com/template/index.php. In setup.php you will then specify the path parameter as "/template/". When you are done, you can then create a new file called "index.html". This file you will put in your server root and will only function as a redirection script, in other words, it will redirect the user directly from your domain (www.mysite.com) to www.mysite.com/meteotemplate/index.php. This will solve the icons problem.

If you are using the above method, then download this file, change the extension from .txt to .html and save it as index.html in your server root. It will redirect users to the meteotemplate directory. If you are unsure or feel lost, simply email me and I will help you with it.

Setup

Very first step is to get the Google Maps API key. This is because this key is necessary to run even the setup.php. Go to this site and create a new Browser API key.

Here is a detailed guide that will show you exactly what to do:
Guide for creating a Google Browser API key

This is so that your key can only be used on your domain. Then open the file googleMapsKey.txt in the same directory (Install) of the template as the setup.php. Replace the XXXXXXX with your API key, save changes, upload the saved text file to your server to this install directory replacing it. Also remember that the changes might take up to 5 minutes to have effect.

Using a web browser, open the setup.php file. You must run this script before doing anything else. The setup.php is located in the install directory of the template folder.
Hint: enter the path in the address bar of your browser http://www.mysite.com/template/install/setup.php.

The first time you run this script, you will not be asked for a password, but you will need to set one now for future access to the page. Once the password is set on this page you will only be able to access this page after you login on the main site. You will need to create two passwords - one for the updates, and one for the template as such. This is because the update password must be passed in a URL, which is not very safe and so the password that allows you to actually administer the page, is secured in a better way and uses the page login system. You can of course set them both to the same thing, but that of course will compromise the security.

Go through this file and fill in all the fields. Really make sure you read the instructions very carefully! This is the most important file of all your template files and a mistake here can very easily cause your site to be completely non-functional!

First part of the file are parameters, which are crucial for the template as such - the MySQL details, the database units, the coordinates etc. These will mostly not be possible to change in the future. As you make your way through the file, you will get to even other things such as the colors, fonts, overall look etc. These can be changed in the future simply by again accessing this setup.php, this time however, already including your password as well, and changing it here. Any changes in this file will have immediate effect.

The very last section of setup.php deals with things like "block appearance" and other things you might not yet know what it means. However, you can simply skip this last Customization part, leave the default values and get back to it later on, once your site is ready and you know what it all means.

When you save your settings for the very first time, a new file called config.php will be created in your template root directory. This is the main settings file that contains all the information for the template to run. You can access this file by opening it directly on your server in a text editor, but you should not, under normal circumstances, need to do that and you can work with this file using the setup.php, which loads the data from it and also changes it if necessary. However, make sure that the folder has write privileges - in other words, make sure that the setup.php can overwrite this config.php once it has been created and you want to change some settings.

MySQL table

What is MySQL

For using the template you do not need to know any details about how MySQL works. Just think of it as a big table, which is saved somewhere on your server and contains all the data from your station. All pages of the template then use this table to calculate all the values, statistics etc. And likewise, your station data is saved to this table at regular intervals, which we will set up later in this tutorial.

Alldata table

A MySQL database can contain more than one table. In fact, if you later on install some additional plugins (add-ons) to the template, it will also use some extra tables. By default however, your database will only contain one single table, which has all your station data in it. And this table will be called alldata.

In case you are a more advanced user and need some more information about the structure of this table, then below is a detailed documentation for it. However, this again is something you normally don't really need to know.

Alldata table documentation

It is not so important for you to understand exactly what the table looks like, but to make this documentation complete, here is the structure of this table:

DateTime - date and time of observation, must be in the format YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss
T - average temperature
Tmax - maximum temperature
Tmin - minimum temperature
H - average humidity
P - average pressure
W - average wind speed
G - maximum wind gust
R - cumulative daily precipitation
RR - rain rate per hour
D - dew point
A - apparent temperature
B - wind bearing (degrees)
S - solar radiation

First thing you of course need to do is create this table. This is done completely automatically. There is just one very important thing. You already had to specify your MySQL details in the setup.php. There is also a button right in that section, where you can immediately check the connection. Therefore, it is crucial to make sure, that once you clicked that button in the setup.php, you got a message saying the connection to the database was successful. This means you need to make sure you have the correct login details (host address, username, password and database name) and that the user is correctly created in your web hosting cPanel and that the user has both read and write permissions to the database. The MySQL database as such cannot be created by PHP, the database, username and password is something you need to generate in your webhosting control panel or if you have your own server do this via the commandline.

Assuming your connection to the database was correctly set up, you can now proceed and create the alldata table. This is done by simply executing one PHP script that lies in the Install directory, the tableCreate.php script. Go to your browser and simply type in the URL of this file, it will look something like:

								http://www.mysite.com/install/tableCreate.php

When you hit ‘return’ on the keyboard, the script will run and create the table automatically and you will get a message the table was created successfuly - ‘Table created!’.

You are now ready to set up the regular updates or also import of history data to this table, which will now be used for storing all data from your station.

If you are familiar with phpMyAdmin - a database management system installed on vast majority of servers and accessible via your cPanel, then you can also look in there and check that the table exists.