CMS 4.0.0-alpha released

Announcements Beta
1

We are pleased to announce the release of our first development preview for the 4.0 version of Xibo. The codename for this version is “Westphal”.

20D/Westphal was a periodic comet with an orbital period of 61 years. It fits the classical definition of a Halley-type comet with (20 years < period < 200 years). It was originally discovered by the German astronomer J. G. Westphal on July 24, 1852.

4.0.0-alpha is a development preview only and should not be used in production. We recommend testing this release with a fresh installation of Xibo. v3 players should connect to this release, and we will be making v4 players available for testing shortly.

Feedback, Feedback, Feedback

This alpha allows all users to test the v4 functionality we have included so far and provide feedback. This allows us to easily see if any areas need further thought or consideration as we move through future alpha/beta releases.

Feedback can be made in reply to this post where a member of the team will pick it up and ask for further details if required.

Alphas/betas and feedback allow all users to have a voice, and we would really encourage that if you have something (no matter how small) make yourself heard!

Download

This release requires PHP 8.1 or later. We also recommend MySQL 8.

Please use the links below to download this release:

Changes

This release is the result of 12 months of enhancements and improvements to the CMS. We’re excited to share all of the new features with you.

Content Creation

Our vision for content creation in v4 is that:

Users need intuitive, simple, yet effective and comprehensive tools to build content quickly.

To achieve this we need to reduce complexity, improve usability and make the user experience more intuitive. We have taken several actions to achieve this:

  • Visually refreshed the Layout and Playlist editors to make them clearer and easier to understand
  • Added drag/drop/resize functionality which shows a live preview
  • Added a suite of new elements and widgets to use!
  • Removed the timeline component in preference to Playlists
  • Overhauled all widget templates and removed most HTML/CSS/JavaScript
  • Made it easier to add/edit interactive actions and triggers

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Developer Experience

In v4 we set out to make it easier to create new widgets! Our ethos was that simple things should be super simple, complicated things should be possible and documented, and unnecessary things should be removed.

We’re adding the finishing touches to this, so for now more details and a full set of documentation will be available in the coming releases.

Future development

We will focus on collecting feedback and making improvements to version 4 and aim to release a 4.0.0-alpha2 in due course!

2 Likes
2 
Creating network "xibo_default" with the default driver
Pulling cms-xmr (xibosignage/xibo-xmr:0.10)...
ERROR: manifest for xibosignage/xibo-xmr:0.10 not found: manifest unknown: manifest unknown

I just tried on a brand new ubuntu 22.04 installation and I received the error above during a docker-compose

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I edited the docker-compose.yml file to include ghcr.io/ before the xibosignage/xibo… and it worked.

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Thank you so much for reporting this - we have updated the tar/zip files with this change too!

5

Is there an eta on a new android player compatible with CMS 4.0.0-alpha specifically the Sync Group / Schedule Sync Event feature.

I’m going to try it on the android 311, but I’m assuming this isn’t supported in this player?

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You can see the UI in the CMS for that now and we hope to have the Android Player available with the alpha-2 release at the latest, which is planned in a couple of weeks time.

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If I can make 1 suggestion, is there any way in the scheduling portion of the synchronize event that we could add a name or some other kind of identifier. For one of our channels, all the content will be sync play and will get difficult to manage if there is no way to separate our which event has which layouts.

1 Like
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Yeah, that seems like a good idea to me - its really hard to tell them apart after you have a few in there.

9

The playlist widget seems to have an issue as it can not be resized or change location or deleted, once click on it open the schedule list instead of highlighting it same as other widgets

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Thanks for raising this - we noticed this too and we’re working on making it behave the same as the others. For the moment you could double click or middle click on it to get the resize handles.

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Hello, just curious if there was an update for Android player to test the new sync fearure

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We’re getting that prepared alongside an alpha2 release next week. There should be an APK available slightly earlier for private beta testers.

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Hello,

Congratulations on v4.

Approximately when is the final release scheduled for? Helps to plan new installations.

Regards,
Shahid

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Thank you!

Our release schedule is as follows:

  • 26th June - alpha1: CMS 4.0.0-alpha released
  • 10th July - alpha2
  • 24th July - beta
  • 7th August - rc1 (feature and look/feel freeze and will be available on our Cloud platform)
  • 21st August - rc2
  • 4th September - 4.0.0 stable release

v3 will receive updates/support until v5 is available

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A post was split to a new topic: MySQL 8 docker container stops immediately

16

Hello,

Is the release of v4 still scheduled for 4 September 2023?

Excellent to set up some test environments.

Regards,
Shahid

| dan dev-team
July 9 |

  • | - |

Thank you!

Our release schedule is as follows:

  • 26th June - alpha1: CMS 4.0.0-alpha released
  • 10th July - alpha2
  • 24th July - beta
  • 7th August - rc1 (feature and look/feel freeze and will be available on our Cloud platform)
  • 21st August - rc2
  • 4th September - 4.0.0 stable release

v3 will receive updates/support until v5 is available

17

Yes, it will be released later on today.