Zap Weather today celebrates its 7th year on the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED). You can visit the Zap Weather page at the JED by clicking here. While you are there, why not vote for it?  According to the JED, Zap Weather has received over 200 thousand hits and is the most popular weather application for Joomla. Thank you!

Zap Weather (formerly Z Weather) was developed to provide a free, non-commercial method of displaying weather on a Joomla site.  This is accomplished through use of data provided freely by the National Weather Service (NWS), which provides the weather information at weather.gov . Zap Weather retrieves this information and formats it for display on a Joomla site.

Interestingly, there have been attempts to curtail the free use of the NWS data by Congress and commercial weather interests.  The "National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005" bill was introduced by Former U.S. Senator and 2012 presidential hopeful Rick Santorum to eliminate the free dissemination of taxpayer-paid weather data from the NWS.  Many believed his legislation was influenced by the owner of Accuweather, a constituent and political contributer to Santorum's campaign.  The bill died in committee.

Version 7 of Zap Weather was recently released to support Joomla 2.5 . This version is a nearly total rewrite of the previous version of Zap Weather, which was originally written for Joomla 1.0.  This version includes 12 and 24 hour forecasts, current conditions and weather alerts, and cronjob support, with more features planned.

Z Content will continue to support Zap Weather and will continue to support the free dissemenation of weather data for "commercial free" weather reporting.

The title pretty much says it all.  There is a new version of Z Weather in town, and it is called Zap Weather.  Why the name change? Well, the name fits well with our other product, Zap Calendar, and, the zapweather.com domain was available.  Version 7 of Zap Weather is now available for download here.  A short installation guide is available in the Zap Weather support section. 

This version is a complete rewrite of version 6, whose heritage goes back to Joomla 1.0.  Version 7 supports Joomla 2.5 (finally!).  We haven't tested it with Joomla 3.0 but it is on the to-do list.  We first want to add some additional features to make Zap Weather version 7 as feature complete as version 6.  This initial release supports 12 hour and 24 hour forecasts, zipcode lookups for latitude/longitude coordinates, and cronjob support.

Also, did we mention Zap Weather is still completely free? We didn't? Well, now you know. Go ahead and try it out and post your comments in the forum.

Zap Calendar is being updated continuously to meet the needs of our customers.  Here is the product roadmap for Zap Calendar in the coming months:

Zap Calendar 3.1 - (estimated release date: Spring 2013)  This release will support Joomla versions 1.5 to 2.5 . It will not support Joomla 3.0.  Due to the removal of many 1.5 compatibility calls, this version can not support Joomla 3.0 while maintaining compatibility with Joomla 1.5, so this version will be the last major release that will support Joomla 1.5.  Future development will be focused on Joomla 2.5 and 3.0 support.  We have strived to support Joomla 1.5 customers for as long as possible (while other extension writers have not), but the writing is on the wall.  The Zap Calendar 3.1 update will include, among other features, support for an event list mode in the calendar browser (with the option to toggle between list mode and grid mode).

Zap Calendar 4.0 - (estimated release date: Summer 2013) This will be a native Joomla 2.5 and 3.0 Joomla release.  It will not support Joomla 1.5 due to the removal of 1.5 compatilbility calls in Joomla 3.0.

Has your subscription expired? Renew today so you can receive future Zap Calendar updates for the next 12 months.  Existing Pro and Standard customers can renew at half the price of the original subscription by clicking on the "Renew" button on the subscription page.