Simple Location 4.3.0 Released

Simple Location 4.3.0 has been released. This continues on the work released last week in 4.2.2.

Measurements in Simple Location have been stored in scientific units(celsius, meters, etc) since 2019, with an option to display in imperial on the frontend. With 4.2.2, the admin will now show in imperial units if you set the setting. This can be overridden on any page by adding the ?sloc_units=metric or ?sloc_units=imperial to the end of the URL.

4.3.0 introduces Meteostat and Visual Crossing as weather providers. Visual Crossing is the first provider that not only offers 1000 queries per day, but pay per use at a fraction of a cent after that. All of the other providers offering a free tier require a monthly fee after that point that well exceeds justification for the amount of posts even the most dedicated poster makes.

Meteostat is a historic only provider. It offers not only an API(key required), but the ability to download all data on a specific weather station(which requires no key). A future version of the plugin could download and cache the weather stations you use the most. For now, only the list of stations is bundled with the plugin, which it uses to determine the closest station.

The National Weather Service, the Met Office(UK), and the Custom Station plugin also cycle through lists of stations to find the closest one.

Expect more enhancements in the weather station category, with so many different ways to get weather stations data.

4.3.0 introduces historic weather support, for providers who offer this without a premium account. This includes Dark Sky(if you still have an API key), Meteostat(which only offers historic data), and Visual Crossing. If someone is paying for premium service on OpenWeatherMap and wants to talk me into adding this, send me a note.

The Fallback Weather provider feature introduced in 4.2.0, which allows for a secondary provider, will be checked if the primary provider does not offer historic weather.

Please remember, somewhere on your site, to provide attribution to the services you use. I’m off to backfill weather on my old posts.