I would like to suggest to add the concept of father/child (or linked) layouts.
Using this, I could create a “base” layout and a number of child layout which link to it, each with a little customization, for example a different logo for each child layout.
If I change the father layout, the child layouts show the change without having to do that in every one.
A lot of this feature will be covered by Playlists - adding something else that does a very similar thing will be too confusing for the user. With Playlists each “child layout” has a common Playlist where appropriate, so that changes to it effect all child Layouts at once. Regions that should be “this Layout only” would not contain shared Playlists.
Playlists wouldn’t do anything for adjustments to the region positions - which I can see being a useful use case. However it is would be complicated/confusing to introduce a new topic to cater for this requirement.
Instead we could look at having a Template setting which “pushed region adjustments to Layouts created from this Template”.
It is not clear what would happen if Regions were deleted or renamed, or if the “child” had already had Regions deleted or renamed (or whether they would be “locked”)
It feels like the child Layout Region positions and status would be locked and only update-able from the template.
When I first used Xibo, I thought that Templates worked right that way.
So, yes, using Templates to push edits to layouts could be a way to have the functionality without cluttering the interface.
The Template-pushed regions should be readonly (and “greyed”, unselectable) in the layouts which reference on it. Otherwise problems could happen if regions are moved or deleted on the layout, and then re-pushed on the next template edit.
OK - we’ve discussed it and we’re not 100% convinced
There are a bunch of questions that came up in our discussion, which have open ended answers - meaning we are not sure! So we will leave this open to gather some more opinions.
