v0.8.18

• Fixes bug that converted string variable fill values to "nan"

v0.8.17

• Added new copy_from_alt config param which allows a template to specify alternate variables from which the data will be copied from if the "name" isn't present.
• Fixed: avoid passing zlib=True on str datatypes to avoid RuntimeError from NetCDF library
  Unidata/netcdf4-python#1205