Welcome to Weather.gov 2.0

Background and core problem

Weather.gov is owned by the National Weather Service (NWS). Weather.gov and associated applications are frequently in the Top-10 list of most-visited federal websites with 1.5 billion visits per year. They are a major source of life and property-saving weather/water/climate information for the public and partners. Often they are the only source for on-demand, detailed weather/water/climate information from 122 Weather Forecast Offices.

The fundamental problem that we’ve observed is that weather.gov reflects its organizational silos (Conway's Law) more than its users’ needs. A lack of overall strategy, feedback/monitoring, and tools have perpetuated this problem.

This has led to a disorganized repository of valuable information that external users struggle to use and internal users struggle to manage.

We will know that we are progressing forward on this problem if people find the information faster, understand it better, continue to see NWS as the authoritative source, and maintain that progress.

Vision, mission, and strategy for MVP

Our vision is that anyone can understand the impact of impending weather. When it comes to making decisions to save life and property, every word and every minute matters.

Our mission is to rebuild weather.gov to reflect the integrity and care NWS has for the people you serve.

Weather.gov 2.0 will only succeed if everyone with NWS sees the site reflect their values, much like the agency. Because the mission and culture at NWS is built around serving, preparing, and protecting people, the site must do the same.

Our strategy for our Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is to make it easier to communicate forecasts and conditions for regular and hazardous weather in a way that anyone can find, understand, and use to take action.

Our primary outcomes for MVP include:

Make it easier to communicate the impact of impending, regular and hazardous weather
Anyone can find, understand, and use the information take action
A sustainable and compliant system

Our primary users for MVP include:

Internal - NWS Meteorologists
External - The Public and Emergency Managers

Strategy and plan

Strategy for prioritization

Now - Prototype individual parts to inform key decisions and evaluate risk
Next - Start building the simplest thing possible
Later - Add complexity, ASAP

Phase	Priorities
Done - Prototype	Partners / gen public view weather basics CMS requirements and viable options Critical data integrations BONUS: Critical third party integrations User validation
Now - Build MVP	A “happy path” for NWS forecasters and public users Core needs across locations Core architecture - CMS, Admin experience, User experience, data integrations, CI/CD pipeline Initial governance User validation
Next - Expand	“Unhappy paths” for forecasters and public users Multiple locations, geographies, or specialized services More comprehensive governance User validation
Later	Transition and migration Continuous improvement

Initial roadmap can be viewed here

How will we ultimately succeed or fail

We will succeed if

all regions and programs work in good faith with the team when the site is ready to expand and cover their needs
decisions are made by those closest to the work, backed by data
we start small with a small group and bring it to more and more people
having the space to test and iteratively improve
Continuously get feedback on working code, over memos and proposals

We will fail if

The site is mandated, instead of organically adopted
We do a big splash rollout
A single miss is considered a failure of the project instead of a learning experience to inform the next version
Decisions are informed by opinions and perceptions, over observations and data
Everyone’s explicit commitment is required to begin development
Everyone’s feedback has to be factored into the solution
The product team works in isolation from the rest of the NWS

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.

Tech Stack

Type: Traditional CMS (aka Legacy, United, Headful :laugh:) Stack: Docker Drupal Image (Apache, PHP, Composer, MariaDB) Languages and frameworks: PHP, Symfony, Twig

Getting Drupal 10 running in Docker

Docker does all the heavy lifting for set up and configurations. It's a cinch to get up and running. Make sure you have Docker installed locally.

Clone this repository into a new directory and cd into it.
Run docker compose up from the command line. Alternatively, install the Docker plugin in VSCode, then right click on the docker-compose.yml and select Compose Up.
Install our site configuration by running make install-site.
Browse to http://localhost:8080 in your broswer. You should see a 404 page because we haven't defined any content. That's okay.
Browse to http://localhost:8080/user/login to log in. Your username is admin and your password is root. Then you can do stuff!

Editing and adding themes

We bind-mount the themes folder so we can test adding a new theme. So changes made in the themes folder are reflected in the host folder.

Navigate to the Drupal Appearance page http://localhost:8080/admin/appearance
Notice the Hello World theme already there.
To create a new theme, run the following commands:
- make shell to get a shell in the container
- cd web to get to the Drupal root folder
- php core/scripts/drupal generate-theme new_weather_theme
  
  [!WARNING]
  Make sure your new theme has underscores (_) as a delimiter. Dashes and spaces WILL NOT WORK.
- exit to leave the container
Refresh the Appearance page and notice new_weather_theme is now installed.
Change title of the theme in themes/new_weather_theme/new_weather_theme.info.yml file to a reader-friendly one, such as New Weather.

That's it! Now when you make changes to theme files, they will sync to the Docker instance. Whenever you make a change to a .twig template, make sure to rebuild the cache using the make clear-cache command.

Installing Drupal core updates

Development

When a new version of Drupal core is available, use Composer to intall the latest updates. See Updating core docs.

Run composer show drupal/core-recommended to see the latest Drupal core version. Then run:

composer update "drupal/core-*" --with-all-dependencies

This will update the required projects: drupal/core-recommended drupal/core-composer-scaffold drupal/core-project-message

The update the db using drush

make shell
drush updatedb
drush cache:rebuild

Production

Push the changed composer.json and composer.lock files to production.
run composer install --no-dev on production, rather than composer update.
run drush updatedb or visit update.php

Kyle01/weather.gov