System

The system settings tab allows you to adjust all options regarding the plugin operations. This tab is visible only if Weather Station runs in extended mode.

The system settings tab

Cache mechanism

If you want to accelerate the rendering of Weather Station widgets, graphs or controls, check the appropriate box. This is especially useful for high traffic sites.
If you want to accelerate backend rendering for Weather Station, check “Cache backend features”. If you notice that some station information (in the station view) is not up to date, uncheck this box.

To ensure that generated files (when publishing data) are always up to date you might want to check “Do not cache generated text files”. This is especially mandatory if you (or your hosting provider) use a cache manager like Varnish.

Resources management

To speed up the rendering of the front pages of your site where controls or widgets are located, place the scripts in the footer. If your site receives a lot of traffic, use the external CDN (jsDelivr). If you want to be sure DOM (Document Object Model) is fully loaded before loading deferred data (loaded by Weather Station script loader), just check “Wait for DOM”.

Quota manager

Weather Station provides a quota manager that allows to track the current consumption of API requests and that, if the quantity of these requests exceeds the allowed quota, offers several alert or blocking modes:

  • Warn but perform queries: does not block the excess requests, warn just before exceeding and after the quota is exceeded. The warning message is in the “At a glance” box.
  • Drop queries just before exceeding: the queries are performed normally all the day long until the limit is reached, then they are blocked until midnight.
  • Distribute queries: based on the estimated consumption (and updated every 20 minutes), the manager will try to distribute queries as best it can throughout the day to get the freshest possible data while not reaching the limit.

If you don’t want to use the quota manager, just select “Always perform queries”.

   In order for the quota manager to work properly, I recommend to use for OpenWeatherMap, Mapbox, etc. (regarding what you’re using) a specific and unique API key for Weather Station. If several of your applications (including Weather Station) use the same API key, the quota manager will not be able to detect what is consumed by the other applications and will so produce wrong consumption analysis…

Logging policy

If you want the events log to not contain too many records (and therefore be lightweight and easier to read) you can specify the minimum level of severity that will be recorded in the events log.

To ensure the events log is regularly purged of these oldest records, you can specify the maximum number and maximum age of events stored in the events log.

   Under normal use of the plugin, I recommend that you do not record events of “information” or “debug” types: these types of events are indeed very numerous and can hinder an easy reading of the log. By default, choosing “Notice” as minimum level of severity is a good choice.

Files

If you want to display, in the Weather Station files manager a button to add a file right from the admin, just check the corresponding check-box. Note it is a security best practice to not display it permanently even if this feature have been designed with security in mind.

You can set here too the maximum retention days of files in the Weather Station files manager.

Task scheduler activity

If you select fast mode, collecting of Pioupiou, WeatherFlow, WeatherLink and file-based station will be faster: the collection job will be executed every 2 minutes instead of 5 minutes.

   Selecting fast mode requires you to have configured an efficient cron.

Automatic provisioning

Weather Station can detect when a BloomSky or Netatmo station or a Healthy Home Coach device is added to (or removed from) your BloomSky or Netatmo account and can thus add or remove the corresponding device of its own list. To enable Weather Station to use this capability, just check the right checkbox.

   If you check this option you will not be able to manually add or remove BloomSky and/or Netatmo devices.

Automatic plugin updates

Weather Station can update itself and I recommend you let it happen. To do this, leave the corresponding checkbox checked.

Health index

If you choose to override the Healthy Home Coaches values, Weather Station will compute its own health index like for other stations types.

Servers time shift

Some services may indicate on what time they are set. This allows Weather Station to calculate the time gap between the service and your own server. If this time gap is too great, this can lead to errors in some calculations.You can set here the maximum allowed servers time shift before Weather Station informs you of the glitch.

Medias retention

You can ask Weather Station to automatically remove old medias it has collected. Note, however, that Weather Station does not collect media as such. It collects references to the media. These references are stored in database, and no file is stored on your server.

Stations views

If you check “Display technical information”, the stations views will show – for stations supporting it – extra technical data about stations: first installation, updates, etc.

Font Awesome

Font Awesome is used in many parts of the plugin. If your theme (or another plugin) outputs Font Awesome, just select the fourth or fifth option. If you want Weather Station to output Font Awesome by itself, select one of the three first option.

Compatibility mode

Settings in this section allows to adapt the operation or display of Weather Station to some specific third-party plugin:

If you use a builder to write your posts or pages, you may discover that some Weather Station graphs or controls do not display correctly in tabbed controls. To avoid this issue, just check the right check-box.

If you use a cache manager and you notice that widgets are not properly refreshed, activate the deferred widgets mode. Please, use this mode only if you notice this behavior.

Links

To define the behavior of internal and external links, just check or uncheck the two options to fit your needs.

HTTP timeout

You can define here, for the three main pools, the maximum time Weather Station is allowed to wait for a server response.

Special

If you like to understand the operating details of a system by analyzing its operating indicators, check the box “I love data analytics”, you will not be disappointed.

By checking the “I want to be a time sorcerer” checkbox, you will activate a new item in the main menu allowing you to act on all scheduled tasks necessary to operate Weather Station.