CMS 4.0.0-beta released

Announcements Beta
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We are pleased to announce the release of our beta 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-beta is a development preview only and should not be used in production. We recommend testing this release with a fresh installation of Xibo.

Earlier test releases working towards 4.0:

Feedback, Feedback, Feedback

This beta 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:

Players

The following beta test players are available to try with this release:

All latest v3 players (Android, Tizen, webOS and Windows) will communicate with a v4 CMS in legacy mode.

Changes

This release builds on the prior alpha releases, further refining the scheduling and layout editing experience.

  • Layout Editor: improved handling for layering
  • Playlist Editor: improvements to the scale and visual presentation
  • Playlist Editor: re-enable drag to position for adding/editing widgets
  • Preview: implement slots/paging for element previewing
  • Preview: fixes for old web engines
  • Sync: improve preloading of Widgets used in synchronised schedules
  • Templates: General improvements to the way template editing works
  • Templates: Zones can be added to templates
  • Testing: expand out automated testing
  • UI/UX: emoji support for text fields :rocket:
  • UI/UX: tidy up and remove old help buttons in preparation for new help links
  • Various bug fixes

Content Synchronisation

The content synchronisation feature is available for beta testing on Android. The ideal configuration is a wired network connection, to the same physical switch, with identical devices. We hope to support different devices on networks which are “further apart” and will update these recommendations once we have further feedback.

We hope to bring this feature to webOS/Tizen and Windows players in due course.

Future development

We will focus on collecting feedback and making improvements to version 4 and aim to release a 4.0.0-rc1 in due course! The “rc” is a “release candidate” and will contain all our intended new features and functionality. 4.0.0-rc1 will be available in the Xibo Cloud.

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We have updated this topic with a beta android player - v4 R400. This can be downloaded using the link in the main post.

This player has experimental support for Content Synchronisation, and full support for communicating with a v4 CMS.

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We have updated this topic with a beta windows player - v4 R400. This player has full support for communicating with a v4 CMS.

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7 posts were split to a new topic: V4 feedback: webpage widget open natively doesn’t work

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Hi , I would like to ask about sync group , is it available in windows and android ? and what is the requirement to have successful sync for players ?

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A post was split to a new topic: Invalid configuration option - 4.0.0-beta

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Great question.

Only Android at the moment.

We will be releasing further documentation when we have some feedback from testing, however in the meantime the ideal configuration is a wired network connection, to the same physical switch, with identical devices.

We hope to bring it to webOS/Tizen and Windows in due course.

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Hi Dan - I’ve installed the 4.0 beta on a personal NAS just to familiarize myself with the interface and in’s and out’s of the software prior to the final release. This may be a silly question, but is there any sort of “beta documentation” anywhere? I was going to try to mimic one of my current layouts just to get a feel of things, and then I’ve found what may be a bug or it may simply be that I don’t really know what I’m doing with this new interface yet. :slight_smile: For instance, I found that when using the Clock - Digital widget, on the configure tab, you are prompted to enter text or HTML in the box, but when I enter HTML, it appears to just be displaying the HTML tags themselves. Thanks in advance for your help! I’m really looking forward to digging in deeper!

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Hi Kevin - we are building up some new documentation, but don’t have anything we’re ready to release yet. As it stands, if you see something that doesn’t make sense, or doesn’t work as you’d expect, it would be most useful to feed it back.

I can’t reproduce this one - this is what I have in my box: EDIT: scratch that, I see that the rendering does not allow HTML (which I think was our intention, but the helptext is wrong). We will fix it.

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Hi Dan
Just testing v4 and i can’t upload font files. Is there a way to upload custom font files?
I can’t use html/css/JS in the text module anymore? I can use html/css/JS with the richtext module in the playlists but that module it’s not availabe in layout designer.

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We have a new section of the CMS dedicated to fonts which you can find in “Administration → Fonts”. It’s broadly the same functionality as before, except separated from the media library.

We’ve moved most of the HTML/CSS functionality into a set of developer tools so that the editor is easier to understand for non-technical users. You can still enter HTML/CSS in the embedded and rich text widgets. We’re trying to encourage the use of text instead of rich text, and so have only made rich text available inside the playlist editor.

Can I ask what you’re trying to do?

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Text animation for restaurant menu advertising tv’s.
Simulating all i have in v3 to v4.
Btw i tried to import a layout from v3 and something went wrong… The new layout was created with nothing inside.

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If you’re happy to PM me your v3 layout I can see why it didn’t import and also what you’re trying to recreate?

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I tried to play with new layout designer. I am CMS V1.8.13 user, not sure if I miss some configuration or got some bug in this version.

  1. Text, line and all shape element were overlapped with image or video in layout preview and when scheduled to player, even all element layer number is higher than image/video layer number.
  2. How long is the image conversion? Always got problem to publish layout while using high resolution image because image still pending for conversion.
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Thank you for the feedback.

We have other reports of this one too - we’ve got it on our list to look at.

Do you have XTR running? Unlike 1.8 where the old “maintenance” process was kind of optional, XTR is required from v2 upward. The process that converts images is run in the background via XTR.

You can use a windows scheduled task for this: Xibo on a Web server | Xibo Digital Signage

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Hi again, Dan - One other thing that I wanted to mention was that in that same text area for the digital clock formatting, with the background of the text area being white, if you change the font color of the text that you’re looking to display to white because it’s on a colored background, it becomes basically impossible to see. Not sure of the best solution for that scenario, but I thought I’d at least point that out. Also, in that same text area, if your content is longer than the actual text area itself, there’s no scroll bar that is displayed, so it’s pretty difficult to get to any text that is outside of the visible area.

Another thing that I found was when trying to implement the weather module in the beta version. It looks like the weather module is pre-installed in this version, but when I went to configure it, there was nowhere to enter the OpenWeather API key.

I was trying to import a layout from our cloud instance into the beta version, and ran into a number of different errors The layout ID that I exported from our cloud instance is #144 if you wanted to check it out for yourself.

I spun up a 3.3.6 self-hosted instance, and while it was much more successful on importing the layout, however, on this new 3.3.6 instance, I’m having a lot of difficulty getting the weather module to function there now though I know I’d gotten it working in the past. I’m using a 2.5 API key and used test link provided in a different forum post of [https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/onecall?lat=50&lon=0&appid=<api_key> which worked fine, but the Get Forecast button in the widget did nothing. I know this is a lot for one single post, so if I should break it up, just let me know.

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I see… I am not configure for XTR yet, because my intentions just to test the v4 functionality since its not ready for daily usage. Thanks for your advise.

Another thing, does the middleware is ready in this beta release? Trying my simple code from CMS1.8 gave me an HTTP ERROR 500. Even the example code from → Architecture - Extend Xibo | Xibo Digital Signage also produce the same error.

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v4 has a new (more extensible) system for most modules that require data! These are called “Connectors” and are available from Administration → Applications. You’ll find Open Weather in there and be able to configure it as before.

The idea being that if you wanted to use a different weather source, you could write a connector for that, plop it in and keep all the same widgets/elements. Most people won’t do that of course, but it should open the way for Xibo to support different weather providers more easily.

Thanks! @Peter perhaps you could give this export/import a go during your CMS testing?

Interesting! We set the background of the text editor to the layout background colour as that is the most likely colour - however I see your point, we will have a think about this.

Noted, thanks.

Middleware will also need some small adjustments to be compatible with v4. We’re working on that documentation ahead of the main release - a working example can be found in Github: xibo/docs/extend/architecture.md at 5800ef98276a783cfca45db04028b7e9be447a29 · xibosignage/xibo · GitHub

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As I look at the layout that I was playing around with, the background of the layout is black, but the background of the text area for editing the clock widget still appears to be white. I know you’d said you were going to be looking into that, but I wanted to make sure to point that out just in case.

Thanks for the info on the Connector, Dan. I did go into my v4 instance and set up the connector with the 2.5 API key that I have had (and tested with the URL noted above), I enabled the connector, enabled the Weather widget, and enabled preview in the Weather widget, but I’m still getting the “No results returned, please configure the Open Weather Map connector!”. As I’d noted earlier, it seems to be similar to the type of results that I’m getting in the 3.3.6 instance that I’d spun up as well. Not sure if that means anything or helps you track anything down. If you’d like me to send you the API key to test out yourself, I’m happy to do that.

I appreciate all of the quick responses from you, Dan! I’ll keep chugging away and let you know what else I come across!

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Thanks! I’ve confirmed with the team that this is fixed in development :+1:

That’s strange, we definitely have weather working more generally - if you’d be prepared to PM your API key to @Peter then he’d be happy to try it our end.