Billboard

Billboard was originally developed by the OIT Outreach Technology group, where they describe Billboard on their information page as:

"Billboard is a digital sign management system that allows for the display of various content on digital signs. It only needs url's to images, movies's, or web pages and it will automatically cache and generate the rotating slide page."

After opening the source code to everyone, we at WolfTech began making changes (including getting it working on Engineering Webservers) and adding functionality so that it would cater more to our needs.

Screen Saver Setup

Our Billboard_Screensaver_Setup page will help you set up the webXsaver screen saver for use with WolfTech's Billboard.

Functionality Changes

• Slide length is now passed along with the Current Slide ID and Slide ID to slides, which allows for a better judging of when they’re about to end

• All IFrames are hidden as the /billboard/ "index" file is loaded; this gives us the ability to display a loading image while all the slides load.

• Titles have been added to both normal group and global-level slides

• HTML and IMG slides can now be refreshed after being displayed, allowing for more dynamic content – i.e. we want our gallery to show different pictures every time the slide appears. However, with the way things were before, the first gallery selected would display until the entire Billboard refreshed. This gives us the opportunity to refresh the slide independent of the entire Billboard.

• Slides can be scheduled to display starting and ending on a certain date.

• The included Mootools was updated in order to use the JavaScript calendar popup.

• Formerly, every PHP slide was automatically an HTML slide which caused an issue when using a PHP script to display a random image from within a folder, even though PHP was sending out an image Content-type. Since the images in the folder could be larger (or smaller) than our display's screen size, putting the image in an IFrame wouldn't properly handle resizing. For this reason, all PHP and JSP slides now have their Content-type's checked. If the Content-type returned begins with "image", Billboard now uses the slide as an image, not an HTML document.

• After performing an action on a slide such as enabling/disabling, Billboard will take you right back to that slide after the page reload.

• When creating new or editing old slides, you can now adjust the position they should be displayed at using a dropdown menu on the slide creation/editing page.

• Slides can be scheduled to display starting and ending at a certain time

• Going to http://www.wolftech.ncsu.edu/billboard/beta on a registered computer will show you a view of your slides if all were enabled. Should allow for easier testing before rolling slides live. ACLs had to be updated to allow for the BetaController (which is essentially a copy of the original IndexController)

• "Unit" groupings created to give people more control over their Billboard groups. For example, there can now be a ECE Unit that all the ECE slide groups now fall under. ECE Unit administrators can now create new subgroups as well as add Unit Slides which appear on all Billboards in that unit.

• Admin and Unit slides are now displayed on the Group URLs page when necessary.

• Totaly runtime for slides now show on slide groups page.

Requested Changes (todo list)

• multiple delete/update option for playlists
• transistion effects?
• reporting -- I've long thought that we could either use the OpenX (http://www.openx.org) as a base for Billboard, or reuse much of the reporting/logging functionality rather than writing from scratch.
• logging
• potential usage of photoframes for info/agendas outside of meeting rooms / teaching labs / classrooms
• email events/triggers
• emergency broadcast / notifications (in progress)
• slide groups
• easy slide movement from one group to another
• deletion date -- completely remove slide from playlist on date X.
• AJAX url editing and disabling/enabling
• Campus crime alerts... might consider keeping an eye on http://safety.ncsu.edu/crimealert/CrimeAlert.asp and when something new is posted, automatically streaming that in a ticker format across all of the boards... separate from any alerts that BB admins can trigger.
• a filter to only show live slides

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If you'd like access to the WolfTech version of Billboard, please e-mail wolftech-webmaster@ncsu.edu