Let’s go for another round!
Tl;dr: the Weather Station plugin has a new owner and maintainer!
The announcement
On June 1st 2023, Pierre announced in a previous blog post that it was time for him to step down from his role as original creator and sole maintainer of the Weather Station plugin. He explained that he was looking for someone to adopt the plugin as he no longer had enough time to maintain the plugin or develop the features he wanted to implement. With the launch of his web hosting business (called Hosterra), he came to the conclusion that he wouldn’t be able to find needed time for many years to come (if he could ever find any).
It may have come as a surprise to you, and even made you worry about the future of the plugin he created back in November 2015 and has been maintaining all this time.
Let’s cut the unbearable suspense! I’d like to inform you that the future of Weather Station is assured. Pierre has handed over the project leadership to me with his full support. My name is Jason Rouet and I’m thrilled to write this message to announce the news to the Weather Station community!
The story
So, after Pierre’s announcement at the beginning of June, I didn’t immediately react. I thought that someone in the community would step in to help Pierre find a successor.
After a few weeks, I got in touch with Pierre to find out if he had found a suitable match to continue caring for his extension. I was surprised when he told me that he hadn’t found any serious candidates to continue his great work!
During our discussion, it was clear I had to do something: so I decided to take over the whole project. I am now the sole owner of the project, which includes the following: the plugin, the website, the official email inbox (yes, weather@station.software is still working, you can reach me at this address), the mailchimp account for the newsletters, the domain names, the social media accounts and so on…
Pierre is truly inspirational, he maintained the plugin without seeking any financial contribution since November 14, 2015 (the date of the initial commit). Our approaches are very similar: I’m doing it because I love open source and want to give something back to the community.
For the context, Pierre and I knew each other. We’re both French, so we met at French WordCamp events like the WordCamp Paris in April 2023 and online via the French WordPress community slack. This obviously helped speed things up. And we dealt the transfer on June the 23rd 2023 in a really effective video call! 😃
This new playground opens up a whole new and exciting field of possibilities. I can’t wait to see where it takes us!
The next steps
As Pierre said in his last blog post, it’s been several years since the Weather Station plugin received a major update. The last version of the plugin was released March 25th 2021.
My priority is to work with him to gain access to the entire toolset. I’m updating access to the tools and familiarising myself with the system he’s put in place over the years.
Then, I migrated the codebase from SVN as a unique and primary control system. To a Github organisation with public repositories to have a more modern approach. SVN will remain the primary control system, as it’s the official one for the WordPress system (if you are curious about it, here is the oficial SVN repo of the plugin), but the working control system will now be Github.
In short, I’ll be using Git and GitHub with Subversion (SVN) Mirroring for the plugin development from now on.
And yes, the Github repository is already live. I fetched the SVN repository over the last weekend and finished the config this morning. From now on, you, the community, will have a more modern way of suggesting enhancements, reporting bugs, discussing new features ideas. Also, if you are a developer yourself, you’ll be able to suggest PRs to me directly! In the future, I can even consider sharing access to trusted developers, allowing them to push commits to the repo!
> Follow this link to visit the plugin’s official Github repository!
At the same time, Pierre and I agreed on hosting the domain names and the website on Hosterra. The website specifically needs some special attention as it was hosted on Pierre’s NAS for years. We now have a robust hosting solution on which I’ll be able to develop the website properly.
I’d like to express my gratitude to Pierre for providing these services at no cost for the coming year, giving me time to concentrate on the plugin without paying any money for it. To show my gratitude, I’ve added a link to his site in the footer. 🫶
To be fully transparent with you, a project like this does involve some annual costs: around a hundred euros for the 3 domain names associated with the project + around €300 for the cost of hosting the website. Nothing I couldn’t afford to pay for in the future, although obviously not having to pay for it makes me happier haha! 😁
This new hosting solution will also help tackle the poor performances, the website is not very fast presently and this is something I’ll work on in the coming days. In the long term, getting rid of Divi builder and relaunching the website with a block theme compatible with Gutenberg will be an exciting challenge!
I’m still unsure about the future of this site’s old forum, Github issues or Github discussions can be intimidating for a non-dev audience, but it’s a powerful tool that’s free and requires no maintenance. In addition, there’s also a support forum on the wordpress.org website, which is quite basic but functional. Let’s talk about it in the comments!
As you can see, I have lots of ideas and the desire to improve things without radically changing everything.
Rest assured, I’m not there to break things nor change habits overnight. My approach involves gradually implementing changes over time to improve the tools.
The next release date
I can see it coming: “when will the next version be available”? 😬
A minor version will be released in the coming days to confirm the change of ownership and prepare the plugin for the next versions.
Transitioning from Pierre, the founder of the plugin, to me will take some time. Also I would like to hear from the community to have an idea of what you really need. I’m thinking about sending a survey to the active users. Meanwhile, go to the Github repo, start a discussion or issues with your needs/ideas and this will give you a clearer idea of what could happen in the next version of the plugin.
- In the short term, the idea is to check that the plugin has no bugs and that it is compatible with the latest versions of WordPress.
- In the medium term, a major update will be to make the plugin fully compatible with the Gutenberg editor, to reduce reliance on widgets so that the plugin can be used on more recent sites.
- And there are also new devices to be compatible with, new ideas for features to be implemented, the admin interface of the plugin could be improved… Behind the scenes, the plugin code will have to be improved to make it more efficient and easier to maintain for years to come.
Also, I thought it is important to make it clear that the plugin will remain free.
For me, like for Pierre before, Weather Station will remain a side project, a hobby and a (high quality) sandbox for learning by developing it. Again, I’m fully transparent with you, this comes with a downside: my time is also limited. Although I’m committed to releasing new versions in the future and offering basic support, I won’t be committing to deadlines. To avoid repeating the same situation, I’ll focus on nurturing a genuine user community.
That’s all folks! The purpose of this first blog post was to introduce myself and my vision of the plugin’s future, and to tell you about the smooth transition which Pierre embraced. I hope my ideas for the coming weeks/months will help launch a new dynamic. Your feedback and comments are needed to get things moving in the right direction! 🤝
I’m expecting to read your messages in the coming days/weeks. For my part, I’m going to work on a few details to ensure a solid foundation for the next releases.
Dear weather enthusiast, before I leave you, I just wanted to say how grateful I am. It’s been an incredible adventure to develop this plugin, to listen to your comments, to implement your suggestions, to provide help when it was needed, to discover how you use Weather Station. An incredible adventure, but also some extremely gratifying moments. In the end, I’m pretty sure I had more pleasure than all of you combined!
I’m also very proud of the work we’ve done and I know that Jason is the best person to take up the torch and give Weather Station—and its community—everything it needs to be the reference plugin for meteorology and climatology.
Jason, I’m immensely grateful for the choice you’ve made, and for everything you’re going to do.– Love you all!
Pierre
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Hello
Merci mais je stop l’aventure
Veuillez me retirer des listes
Merci bonne continuation
Salut “Météo Thénioux”, j’ai bien lu votre message ici et sur le forum de support wordpress.org du plugin.
J’ai vérifié et votre adresse n’apparait pas dans la liste des contacts Mailchimp.
Si vous avez reçu une notification automatique à partir de ce site, cela doit venir de votre compte lié au forum communautaire. Je peux supprimer votre compte si c’est ce que vous souhaitez.
Pour les notifs liées au forum de support sur wordpress.org, c’est lié à votre compte sur cette plateforme, c’est à vous de voir pour vous désabonner des sujets que vous suivez éventuellement là-bas.
En espérant que ce retour vous convienne ! 🙂
(Je suis curieux, quand vous dites que vous arrêtez l’aventure, c’est que vous n’utilisiez déjà plus le plugin ? Ou pour une autre raison ?)
Nice to hear that a good successor to Pierre has been found. Jason I wish you a lot of fun developing this Weather Station plugin. I still use this plugin to this day and definitely want to continue with it.
Pierre, thank you for developing this plugin and for taking the time to provide the necessary support on the forum.
Greeting from the Netherlands
Hans Woudenberg
Hello Hans, thank you for your kind words! As a regular user of the plugin, if you have any feedback to improve it, just let me know! 🙂
Congratulations Jason, let the adventure begin.
Fair winds and following seas.
Hi Thomas, thank you very much! 🙂
Delighted to hear that its future is secure. Would have loved to help but sadly my development skills are way out of date.
Many thanks to you, Jason, and also to Pierre for his many years of development and support.
Hello Roger, even if you aren’t a developer but you want to give some help to the project, you could help translate the plugin, have a look at the documentation, proofread the website…
Woohoooo! So glad you stepped up Jason! Thanks! I wish you all the best in further developing this great software Pierre built. I’d be happy to continue doing the Dutch translations.
Looking forward to thing to come. But also thank you Pierre for not letting go of this software.
Dag Gerhard, congrats for maintaining the Dutsch translation! 🇳🇱🫶
The Dutch-speaking community seems very active, with several people commenting on the article!
Great news! I wish you all the best and all the positive things this job has in it.
I can’t wait to see the wheel starting to roll again!
Thanks for your dedication.
Hola Salvador! Thank you for your message.
A minor release has been deployed yesterday to change the plugin author and gain access to the official WordPress.org page of the plugin.
For the next releases, be patient, I’ll need some time to review the codebase and prioritise what could be added in future updates.
If you have any ideas/feedbacks, I’d like to know more!
what a Wonderfull news!!! I am using your plug in on our website and I love it.
anyway some updates are necessary, I have sometime problems with wind graph,
i have a daily graph with wind intensity and wind gust. sometime the wind intensity is more the wind gust.
also the velocity performance is to improve, I did some testing and the WordPress is slow when you turn on the plug in
Ciao Angelo, I had a look at your website and it’s really great!
I’d like to know more about your problems, would you mind sharing a more detailed recap of what could be improved by opening an issue here: https://github.com/Weather-Station-Software/live-weather-station/issues
Many thanks 🙂
Congratulations Jason! This is definitely the best weather plugin on WordPress and I am so pleased that you have taken over the project. Our model aero club relies heavily on the feedback from our remote weather station and having that information in real time before you make the up to 100km journey to our flying field is a godsend. I have used Github before and my son is a senior software engineer working for a US company and is familiar with all the terms you have described. I look forward to seeing what can be done with further development but the product is great as it is.
Finally, a big thank you to Pierre for his outstanding and unselfish approach providing this world class plugin free of charge over many years, and for sharing all this with you Jason.
I wish all the best going forward and to Pierre – enjoy your new projects. Thank you!
Hello George, wow thank you so much for this long comment! 👌
I just had a look at your Lanceston Model Aero Club, it’s brilliant. Indeed it does seem really useful considering the distance to the take-off field!
Please let me know if you have ideas/feedbacks but need help publishing it to Github! 🙂
Hi Jason,
I have some little issues around some controls not reporting correctly. I did post on the Community Support page but I wasn’t able to get an answer. Github seems the best way to log issues and enhancement requests. When you say “need help publishing to Github” what are you looking for. My son Stuart might be able to provide some tips on that? I asked him and he said “There are two parts to it – one is creating a new release on GitHub and then uploading an archive of the new release. I can certainly provide tips on this part.
The other is building a release of your software. Hopefully Jason knows how to build a release of the Weather application, as that would be a question for the previous maintainer. ”
Let me know if there is anything he can help with.
PS: Sorry for my slow reply – I didn’t get any notice that you had replied.
Bravo ! Merci d’avoir repris ce plugin unique en son genre et qui est parfait pour tout féru de météorologie !
Merci Tommy, n’hésite pas si tu as des idées. Je ne suis pas un expert en météorologie donc toute aide est bonne à prendre !😃
Una gran noticia! Uso el complemento en mi web personal donde tengo dos estaciones DAVIS conectadas. (https://observatoris.peremeteo.com) Esperando con ganas las novedades!
Hello Pere, thank you for your answer! I translated it as I’m not familiar with spanish.
I had a look at your website, great work! 🙂
Do you have any idea or problem to share about your 2 Davis stations connection?
I have been working with the plugin for more than 4 months without any problem
Hi Jason,
that are great news, thank you and good luck with all your endeavors! I’m happy to keep overseeing and maintaining the German translation 🇦🇹🇨🇭🇩🇪
Chris
Hallo Chris, es freut mich, deutschsprachige Personen in der User-Community zu sehen! LG ✌️
Ahhh, sehr schön, dass wir uns auch auf Deutsch unterhalten können 😁
Hello again Jason,
In one comment you asked for feedback and ways to improve the plugin. What is your preferred method for logging feedback and or enhancement requests – Github or the Forum?
Thanks, George
Ich bin sehr erfreut das dieses Plugin, welches ich seit Jahren nutze weitergeführt wird!
Hi Jason,
It would appear that you are busy with other projects. Nothing seems to change and any questions remain unanswered?
Comment *Ciao Jason, sono contento che il progetto Weather Station possa continuare con un nuovo proprietario. Io non sono uno sviluppatore ma volentieri farò delle donazioni in denaro per sostenere economicamente questo progetto.
Grazie !
Welcome, and thank you for taking over!
However, after my wordpress install was updated yesterday (and the Weather Station plugin also got updated), my station has lost all access to Netatmo (I have confirmed via login to Netatmo, that my account/password is correct)?
Looking in the Events:
Timestamp : 2023-11-12 23:10:25 (7 mins ago)
System : API / SDK 3.8.13
Service : Netatmo
Error code : 400
HTTP error.
Type: unknown
Detail: Array
(
[error] => unauthorized_client
)
HI. Yesterday I had to reinstall WordPress with the Weather Station plugin. However I can’t log in. The warning says my details are incorrect! I’m reading around that several people have this problem. Could you help us solve it? The plugin was awesome and I would like to continue using it!
Hi,
This plugin is not available through WordPress.org, any news on this?
Is there another way to install (Sorry, not familiar with WP)?
Anyway, this plugin looks great.
Hi is the weather station still alive? wordpress site tells me it is removed due to a security issue. I will download an old version and see if it still works. Thanks!
hi everyone
as long as you didn’t uninstall its still working but there is some issues like the map not displaying etc.. , i didn’t try to uninstall and reinstall because i am afraid to loose it