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Category:Cumulus MX: Difference between revisions
→Completely new MX installation
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Create a new directory (recommended name CumulusMX) and unzip the contents of the download package into it. See notes above for extras required in various operating systems.
The package contains everything else you need to read from your weather station (if it is a supported model), to load up the user interface (for settings and some simple web pages to see on a device connected to your home network
=== The provided web pages ===
Setting up a web site is covered in [[Website_setup|this wiki page]] and the pages linked from there. I won't repeat that, but will try to explain below the MX context of the various files involved.
Cumulus MX provides a set of web templates, images, and json files, in '''\CumulusMX\web'''. If you have a web server, then MX can process these files and upload them for you (by default using File Transfer Process) providing you specify the host, port, protocol, directory, username, and password, for the upload process to use. If you don't understand any of these terms, then this is not the place for explaining them, but generally if your web space is supplied by a provider, they will be able to tell you most of these settings, and you will choose the directory name. If you have set up a web server yourself, then you should know the required settings.
The web templates included are based on designs by Beth Loft used for Cumulus 1. They are written in fairly simple Hyper-Text Mark-up Language. They are called templates (and have a 'T' at the end of the file name before the extension) because they include web tags that Cumulus has to process to insert the current actual values and then Cumulus will generate a web page that can be uploaded. Most layouts include a table for showing values and styling that gives a graded background colour. The tables include a navigation row with links to the other pages in the set. That navigation line fixes the width of the table, and you will realise it was designed in the days when all monitors were a standard shape and cannot adapt to the range of devices we use for viewing web pages nowadays. However, Steve Loft (who wrote the original Cumulus software) said "They exist because they're our web pages, and they're really only included with Cumulus as examples of how the web tags work. It never occurred to me that most people would simply use the supplied examples instead of creating their own pages!"
The web template that does not include a table is called '''trendsT.htm''', that creates a structure that can display graphs. The data for all the graphs that can be displayed is contained in the various '''json''' files in '''\CumulusMX\web''', these files are also processed by Cumulus so latest values are added, and then uploaded so the web page produced by this template can use them.
The image that is provided in '''\CumulusMX\web''' is ''MoonBaseImage.png'', MX can be set to use that to generate (on MX start-up and on the hour) "moon.png" which it then can FTP to your web (also on the hour).
To set up your web server for the first time, you need to do a one-off installation of a number of files that do not change. These are found in '''\CumulusMX\webfiles''' and its sub-folders. these include the standard styling file '''\CumulusMX\webfiles\weatherstyle.css''' which you place in the directory specified for the uploads. To do this, you will probably need to invoke a FTP process outside of Cumulus. The filezilla client is a popular choice, although other software to do this is also available. Next you have three sub-folders, each of those sub-folders need to be replicated '''within''' the directory specified for the uploads. For example '''\CumulusMX\webfiles\images\picture.jpg''' will be stored in a "images" sub-directory of the upload directory and is used as the background image for web pages. There is nothing to stop you creating your own "picture.jpg" (instead of uploading the supplied one) and then Cumulus web pages will use that for the background image on each page. Similarly '''\CumulusMX\webfiles\js\cumuluscharts.js''' needs to be stored in a "js" sub-directory of your upload directory (this is the script that allows you to change the chart shown on the trends page and uses the appropriate json file to populate it with data). The "lib" sub-folder contains further levels of sub-folders all to be replicated on your web site.
== Changing from Cumulus 1 to MX ==
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