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.