Setting up the Bamboo Solutions free World Clock and Weather web part
Head to
www.bamboosolutions.com and browse to Web Parts and find the World Clock and Weather Web Part
Or head straight to:
https://store.bamboosolutions.com/pc-55-1-world-clock-and-weather-web-part.aspx
You’ll need to register and get a free account to download this free (for now) web part from them.
After doing so, extract the files to a folder on your Web Front End (WFE) and then run setup.bat by double-clicking on it.
You’ll get this screen:
Click Run, then:
Click on the Bamboo World Clock and Weather WebPart on the left side, which should cause “Install” to appear on the right:
Then,
Click Run, then select the web apps to which you want to install the part. As I’ve said before and I’m sure you’ve experienced, an error here is almost certainly a security issue. Go get some more rights and come back to it if it fails.
Once it’s installed, you’ll get a message about resetting IIS, so:
C> iisreset /noforce
So, we’ve cycled our web apps and lost our JIT compilation, which will cause pages to load slowly the first time we hit them, so let’s run our warmup script, which we’ve hopefully got configured as a task (if not, see this post: http://vanlaan.typepad.com/van_laan_on_sharepoint/2007/08/sharepoint-quic.html ).
Right-click and Run the task:
Now, let’s head to a site to get it on the page and configured.
The only thing I’ve done with this site collection is create it with the Publishing, Collaboration template and change the site theme to Belltown. (This client likes teal--alot).
Click Site Actions, Edit Page:
You’ll see the editing view:
Click on Add a Web Part on the Zone you prefer. We’ll choose the Bottmo zone which, ironically enough, is towards the bottom right now. Or, we could click the drop-down beside Page on the upper left side and select Add web parts, like this:
But, I’m going to click the add a web part link in the bottom zone:
I don’t see what I want in these default web parts, so I’m going to click Advanced Web part gallery and options:
I’ll get this applet on the right:
Notice there’s a ton of web parts in the normal gallery for this page, and only one in the Server Gallery. That’s going to be our freshly installed web part, which we’ve installed globally to the server. While we ran a nice .MSI application package created by Bamboo solutions, most likely in the background, at some point, this command was run:
C> stsadm.exe –o addwppack –filename Bamboo. WorldClockAndWeather.SPv3.cab –globalinstall
Or, if you don’t have the BIN directory added to your PATH system statement yet, then this command:
Anyways, there it is. Click on Server Gallery to see the part:
Hit the drop-down at the bottom to select your zone, then click Add.
Now, scroll down and we should our web part on the page. Here it is on my page. Looks like it’s defaulted to Reston , VA.
Anyways, let’s get the settings we desire by clicking the edit drop-down and selecting Modify Shared Web Part:
Now, we’ve got our World Clock and Weather web part configuration applet. Let’s remove the default location and add a couple more:
Now, let’s click Ok, to get out of the modify web part dialogue. And then Check the Page in so we don’t lose our work:
We’ll make it a major version and go ahead and Publish it.
Now, we’ve got it on our page, but the title doesn’t look that hot, so let’s fix that.
Site Actions, Edit page, edit drop-down menu on the web part, then Modify Shared web part:
You can see there that I’ve expanded the Appearance settings area by clicking the + sign and changed the title from “Bamboo World Clock and Weather Web Part” to “Time and Weather”. Nice and simple.
Click Ok. Click Publish. Looks pretty nice:
Hmmm… Something’s still not just right. This time, we’ll go straight into modifying the web part by hitting the drop-down arrow and selecting Modify Shared Web Part right from there:
And then go in and change the date/time format to something a bit more user-friendly:
Which gives us:
