MCF User Guide
Weather
The weather widget shows the current conditions and a short forecast for your parish. It is a friendly, local touch for your homepage — and genuinely useful when residents are deciding whether to head out to an event or the village green.
What the widget shows
The widget has two parts: a current-conditions card and a forecast strip.
| Part | What it displays |
|---|---|
| Current conditions | The temperature now, what it feels like, humidity and wind, with a weather icon. |
| Forecast | A grid of upcoming days, each with its own icon and temperature — up to five days ahead. |
Where the location comes from
The widget shows the weather for your parish location — the centre coordinates you set in Site Settings. These are the same coordinates the Interactive Map and Virtual Tour use, so you only set them once.
- Go to Settings › Site Settings and open the Parish Location tab.
- Enter the centre latitude and centre longitude for your parish.
- Select Save. The weather widget now reports for that location.
If your map and virtual tour already centre correctly, the weather widget will too — it reads the very same coordinates. See Interactive Map for the full walkthrough of setting your parish location.
Before you begin
The widget pulls live data from a weather service, so it needs that service's API key to be set up for the council. This is normally done once during initial setup. If the widget shows no data, ask your super administrator to check the weather service key is in place.
How the widget appears on a page
The weather widget is one of the building blocks available in the page builder, and it comes ready-placed on the homepage. When a colleague who manages your pages adds or edits the block, they can set:
- A heading for the widget.
- Whether to show the forecast as well as current conditions.
- How many forecast days to display — between one and five.
On a busy homepage, showing current conditions plus a three-day forecast often reads more cleanly than a full five days. Choose the number of days that suits the space.