HappenBoard can show the weather for an event’s date at its venue. The feature is switched off when you install the plugin, and nothing is fetched from the internet until you turn it on. This guide turns it on and explains what each option costs you.
Turn it on
- Go to HappenBoard → Integrations and click the Weather card.
- Switch on Enable weather.
- Click Save changes.
While the toggle is off, the Event Weather block renders nothing and no request is made to any weather service. Turning it back off later has the same effect: the calls stop.
Where the data comes from
Weather is fetched from Open-Meteo, a free European service that needs no account for normal use. The request is made by your server, not by the visitor’s browser, so your visitors’ addresses are never sent to the weather service.
What is shown depends on how far away the event is:
- Within the next 16 days: a real forecast.
- In the past: the observed weather for that day.
- Further out than 16 days: the seasonal normal for that date, based on ten years of records around the same day of the year.
That is why an event six months away still shows something useful instead of an empty box.
Forecast cache duration (hours)
How long a forecast is reused before it is fetched again. The minimum is 30 minutes and the maximum is a week; the field is entered in hours and accepts half hours. Past weather and seasonal normals never change, so they are cached permanently and are not affected by this setting.
Leave it alone unless you have a reason to change it. A longer cache means fewer calls; a shorter one means fresher numbers for events happening today.
The credit line
Open-Meteo publishes its data under a licence that requires attribution. Show "Weather data by Open-Meteo" credit is on by default and prints that line inside the block, with the name linked to open-meteo.com.
Credit text lets you word it yourself. Leave it blank for the default. If your wording mentions Open-Meteo, that mention is linked automatically; if it does not, the link is added on the end so the attribution stays valid.
You can switch the credit off in the block, but the licence still applies. If you do, put the credit somewhere else on the site, such as your footer or a credits page. The panel reminds you of this when you turn it off.
The optional API key
Open-Meteo commercial API key is for sites that have bought a commercial plan. Leave it blank and HappenBoard uses the free service, which is the normal setup. A key routes the requests to the commercial endpoints with higher limits instead.
Like the other keys in Integrations, it is write-only: the field is empty when you reopen the panel, and leaving it empty keeps whatever is stored.
Watching the usage
The panel shows API calls in the last 30 days and the time of the last fetch, so you can see whether the cache is doing its job. Clear weather cache throws away every stored response and forces the next page view to fetch again. Use it after changing the cache duration, or if you suspect a stale forecast.
Showing weather on a page
Enabling the feature does not put weather anywhere by itself. You still need to add the Event Weather block to your single event template, and the event needs coordinates: either latitude and longitude set on the block, or a linked venue that has them. Venues: creating and geocoding covers filling those in. With no coordinates the block renders nothing.
Those same coordinates feed the venue map, so a venue set up once serves both.