I have a few Joomla sites with Z Weather running for some time now and I must say this is a First-Class little tool.

Installation is flawless, as is the overall function of the component and module. They both are nicely customizable and provide a clean, professional look. With the Cron job grabbing the weather data in the background, the visitor gets no delay in the page load. SWEET!

Oh, and the support! I had an issue that ended up being my host's fault, but my buddy at Z Content stuck with me the whole way and went the extra mile to help.

Install this on your site to prove to yourself how good it is, and then send them a donation. That's what I did!

Way to go. I have been looking for this for so long. Weather module that is thin enough for my left module position that has multi-day forecast. We have been using rawcontent to add weather channel widget on sites, which is full of links and is too big. This is perfect and you can really customize it.

9 thumbs up for dan(at)zcontent. You get a perfect score from me!

If you have a site with a lot of traffic, I would not recommend using the Module for Z Weather on every page. I do websites for some radios stations that wanted current conditions on every page and through trial and error, discovered that the module adds 3 - 5 seconds of load time to a page. I still use it, but only on one page and not the whole site.

The info updates well from the NWS and it's a great component. I would recommend, but don't use the module on every page. Just use it on one "Weather" page.

Owner's reply:
Thanks for the review. The slowness is caused when the component retreives new weather data from the National Weather Service server. The optional cronjob feature was recently released for version 6 of Z Weather, which updates the weather data instead of your website visitors. This will improve your website performance on pages where the Z Weather component or module are used.

Earlier versions used to be a little difficult to work with. Now, it's a breeze and works well with J1.5. The versatility is amazing without limiting ease of use. NB - we don't use the cron function. It would be nice to be able to do a truly horizontal display for those templates that have a header banner. Comes close, but not quite. ZWeather has come a long way in a year. Kudos to the developer.

I've been using Z Weather on 4 weather sites, mainly for the forecast, for quite some time now. It is very easy to set up and get running. For the most part it works flawlessly but is sometimes very slow updating the cache if bad weather is occurring. This seems to be due to the NWS and not the script itself. I have had NO success in getting the cron script working, which I need very badly, and have emailed the author 3 times with no reply. Overall, this script is well worth paying for so it's a super deal for free. Better documentation on implementing the cron script would make it excellent. I would appreciate if anyone who is successfully using the cron script would contact me with a little how-to.

I have tried MANY different methods for adding weather to my sites inluding Joomla modules, add-ins from various weather sites, and so-on. Nothing that I have seen compares to Z Weather.

My only wish is that a 1.5 Native version gets released soon. That would make this the perfect module.

I installed the Beta 1 release of version 6 on our Joomla 1.5 site. We experienced a problem due to our php version and contacted support - which resolved our problem and created a new release (Beta 2) less than an hour later.

The Beta 2 installation was flawless. I don't know how the installation and configuration of this component could be made any easier. It is that easy!

I also like the fact that the component isn't supported by advertizing. Overall, it you are looking to implement weather into your Joomla site, this is the component to use.

All round one of the best tools - easy to install, easy to configure, easy to use! Great job! Thank you

This is an excellent extension, but contains a few problems that need to be worked through. When I upgraded to beta 2, I was unable to see the output in component view (www.yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_zweather), although it worked fine in the new module. The new location editor is an improvement, but if one accidentally "backs out" of a location without hitting save or cancel, the location locks and it is impossible to get back into it or to access it in any way. I am really looking forward to the cron job for version 6. I was unable to get it to work in version 5, so I am hoping to really work on the new version when it is out (I have godaddy server, which really makes this particular cron job difficult to implement). But again, this is a wonderful product.

Owner's reply:
Hi jaytr,



With version 6, you now need to assign a menu item to Z Weather since it grabs the component settings from there. This method is different from version 5 but it now allows multiple component pages for different weather locations. Your URL will change with an appended "&Itemid=xx" text to reflect this.



For the record locking, you can try the "Global Check-In" menu option under the Joomla Administrator's Tools menu to release the lock. I will look into having a better solution for the next release. Thanks for the input.

Takes a bit of knowledge to install and configure, particularly in regards to cron job, but it is a very nice and clean display with excellent information and the customers love it.

This is not the easiest component I've worked with but once you get everything up and running it is flawless. If you are missing an icon from the database just search google for that particular missing picture and add it to your z weather images (though you might have to do it ten times for % chance of precipitation 10,20,30...etc) All Good!

Mac @ ShopZanesville.net

Installation of this component was a snap! The clean design with no advertising is a big plus. A terrific addition to my community site. Everything seems to be working well on my 1.0.13 Joomla site.
Thanks to the creator for this wonderful component and module.

This is a great addition to the Joomla! community, BUT! This has happened to me twice on the same website, yet, not on another website on the same server: all of the sudden, I start getting LONG warning messages from the zWeather module on the front page of the site about a line of code. I haven't changed anything in the site, it just all of the sudden refers to line 470 in the components/com_zweather/zweather.class.php file.

I'm not a programmer and I never have claimed to be, but I know that a warning like this isn't suppposed to appear all of the sudden after five months of use. I have tried to contact the programmers through their website twice, with no response.

This is a great joomla component/module but documentation is lacking. I configured the module and the component to show the weather starting "today" but it only display starting "tomorrow". I search high and low ans still can't find a solution as to why this is happening. I spent hours turning features and options on and off to play around with this, but no luck in getting it to work right.

Great module, but it breaks my layout in Internet Explorer 6. Very frustrating. Expands too far.