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.
The following are the list of changes that have been made:
1) 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
2) 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.
3) Titles have been added to both normal group and global-level slides
4) 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.
5) Slides can be scheduled to display starting and ending on a certain date.
6) The included Mootools was updated in order to use the JavaScript calendar popup.
7) 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.