Adding the ability to schedule regions inside of layouts, and layouts within campaigns

Hi,

I am requesting the implementation of a feature that would help me tremendously. I would like to be able to schedule individual regions within a layout. For instance, some of my clients have multiple regions on screen…video, ticker and side banner. I would like to be able to schedule the videos as some of the videos have expiration dates. I now work around this by having all of my scheduled content go full screen, then return to my multi-region template for ads with no dayparting.

I would also like the ability to schedule layouts that are within a campaign. This would help considerably. I like being able to see all my live content at a glance in the campaign. I also like the flexibility of moving the videos around to change the sequence. If I could schedule layouts within a campaign, I could have all my content for each client in one spot, at a glance.

Thanks so much!

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This will be addressed at some point via this: Media Start and End Date. Playlists are already in 1.8 (via the API) and we are working on a new user interface for them. Once that is done we will look at the Playlist enhancements, with this being one of the first items to be addressed.

Scheduling layouts within a campaign has been mentioned before here: Scheduling layout in Campaign. At the time (and now) I am not convinced that the extra complexity is warranted. My feeling has always been that if there is something wrong with scheduling layouts, then that should be addressed within the Scheduling tool and not somewhere else. Is there a way we could improve that tool which would satisfy your requirement?

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I’m right there with you. I have 4 “channels”, 3 that are single region with just an image or slide. However, my main channel’s layout has an RSS feed, HTML weather widget, and time, along with the region that has time sensitive content.

At this point, I have to set a reminder when to upload the content since most slides cannot go up until a specific date, then set another reminder to remove the content when it becomes stale.

Having the ability to set when content goes live and when it goes away would make my workflow infinitely more efficient.

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I hear you! Being able to schedule regions within 1 layout would be AWESOME!

I certainly understand the requirement, the problem is that I cannot see any way to achieve it without making the whole thing truly horrendous to operate.

Adding a start/end time to each widget in a playlist is fair enough - and can/will be done in due course (this also makes things extremely complicated to understand - “why does my content not come up?” becomes a very difficult question to answer).

Adding scheduling for Layouts in a Campaign would then be 3 levels of scheduling.

Fairly soon we will have “overlay layouts” which can be scheduled at the same time as normal layouts and stay on screen over the top (so you can have RSS showing constantly without being restarted by a layout refresh, or so you can show an emergency message). That would then be 4 levels of scheduling :confounded:

My dear, I didn’t mean to stir the pot! You guys are doing fantastic and I
know that changes like these require many changes down a string of features.

:smiley: I wasn’t trying to say you were pot-siring, merely that it things haven’t quite clicked into place for me with these 2nd, 3rd and 4th levels of schedule.

I’m sure there will be some ideas out there for how to achieve it

Here is why this is important:
We use Xibo for our university. We have multiple screens, and a litany of events to display. We show location specific content on each screen (e.g. what shows in the theater doesn’t necessarily need to be seen in the gym). The media for each event needs to be able to be scheduled for a specific time period. The way the system currently works (unless I am mistaken), I have to create a new layout for each and every event, and then schedule that layout for each and every screen it needs to display on.
Content level scheduling - as simple as being able to set a publish start/end date, would allow me to have one layout for each screen, and simply add the correct content for that screen. From what I can tell, this is not currently possible (if it is, please let me know!).
-sk

Would it not then be really hard to know which of your screens had nothing on the layout to show - since all the assigned content was out of it’s publish window - without manually checking each one?

Display Groups would greatly streamline your current workflow.

Actually, the opposite is true. We have several items for each location that are “evergreen,” so that no screen can ever be without content. But the way the system works now, we have to either check the layout to make sure that expired content is removed, or create a separate layout for every item so that we can schedule it for the correct time period.

A content-level publish date could allow you to either set an item to have no start/end dates, or to set the correct start/end dates, so that it could be added to a layout and disappear at the appropriate time, so that you don’t have to create a separate layout for every item.

Honestly, Xibo is better by far than other systems we have used, other than this one thing. I appreciate your hard work!

-Shawn

A side note for future reference - we’d probably want to ensure that widget (content) level scheduling only became available if there was one “evergreen” item in the region

Is there any advancement in this topic?

Hi there,

Somewhat. You can use an Overlay Layout. Here is some information on the feature. Please let me know if you need any further clarification or insight. I’m happy to help.

https://blog.xibo.org.uk/using-overlay-layouts-in-1-8/

It would be so much easier if we can create a programmable region, like:

  • You create a normal layout

  • You add your region

  • You set one programable in the option menu

  • When you go to schedule your layout you have a new button and when you click on it you have a new box that shows you the another schedule menu and you can JUST schedule media and not layout (like it gives you a list of media and maybe widget?)

That way, you make sure that you will never schedule a “schedule region” without scheduling the layout!

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I dont know if i’m clear enough

Hi Leo,

I wanted to let you know about the new scheduling features coming up in 2.0.

The 2.0 release (currently available in alpha) will have a lot of additional features including some changes to the scheduling.

On the Layout Designer you will have a Toolbox and an option to assign “Expiry Dates” to the Widgets, imagine you upload a media file, add it to the layout, but you don’t actually want to show it yet.

You can add the media widget to the layout then add Expiry Dates to the widget, which means assigning From and To Dates to the Widget itself, it will only be sent to the player (and displayed by the player) between those two Dates.

To take it a step further, 2.0 also has fully implemented playlist with playlist editor, as such you can design the playlist in playlist editor (playlist contains widgets) ie say you can prepare a playlist with 5 images, 2 videos, save it, add it to the layout (as a sub-playlist available in 2.0), and then, if needed, add Expiry Dates on the subplaylist.

The sub-playlist will show all widgets that were added to it (ie in my example it would go through 5 images and 2 videos), playlists are of course re-usable ie you can assign the same playlist to multiple layouts.

The idea is to make the content management/scheduling/layout design easier and more user friendly :).

2.0 Release features the draft/published layout states as well ie imagine you have your layout imported from 1.8 CMS (or after upgrade to 1.8), it will come in with Published status, layouts with such status will be sent to the players (once scheduled of course).

When you want to make changes to the layout, say redesign it, add widgets to it etc, you need to checkout the layout (which changes the status to Draft), any changes you make while in this status are saved, BUT not sent to the players ie player will continue to show the last published version of that layout.

Once you’re happy with your changes (or once the time has come to update that layout) you can publish it and then player will show that updated version.

I think these new features will satisfy your scheduling requirement. 2.0 Beta should be out in a few weeks. Please let me know if you’d like any further information.

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