I’ve got 5 identical layouts, one each for Mon, Tue, Weds, Thu & Fri, but with one region displaying a different image corresponding to the day of the week. These are scheduled for Mon repeating, Tue repeating, etc., in perpetuity.
But to change content in the other regions I have to do this in each layout and repeat the same work 5 times.
Is there an easier way to achieve this? Ideally I’d like just one layout but my day of the week region needs to change its content each day to to right image.
If the content is identical for all layouts, except for one region that contains the image for each day, you may find it easier to create a template of the layout.
For example, let’s say you have created a layout and wish to have a second version with only minor changes. Once you have created this layout, select the Layouts option in your CMS, select the down facing arrow at the end of the layout and select copy from the drop down menu. You can then edit the copy and make the minor changes only, instead of having to create a second layout from scratch.
Thanks for the suggestion. I did try that - creating a master layout & making copies, then changing the day of the week image on each, and scheduling them for display. But I still found that quite a lot of work.
Maybe I could I use an iframe element that points to URL/image.jpg and then the only thing I would need to do is overwrite this file with the correct one for the day, then it would be picked up by Xibo. My 5 layouts could then just be 1. Would this work?
You could use one Layout that is scheduled to run across the entire week, instead of a Layout for each day. If the only information that needs to change is the image displaying the day of the week, you could change this each day instead.
You could create a Dataset that contains a single column. Set the Data Type for the column to library or external image depending on your preference. Once you have done this, create a Data row and add the image you wish to display for the day. Create a Ticker widget in the region that you wish to display the image in, which will now display the image from the Dataset. When you want to change the image, you can edit your Dataset and change the image in the row, which will then update the Layout.
You could use an overlay layout. That would mean the content you edit each day would be on one layout (so you only have to update that in one place). Your image that changes each day would then be in 5 separate layouts scheduled appropriately for each day of the week as an overlay. The Player will then composite the two together for you so they appear to be one layout - but they’re not.
You could put your daily images in to a dataset, and then use a ticker based on that dataset with an appropriate filter to show the image corresponding to that day on the correct day of the week.
You’d need a column in the dataset for day of the the week (1 being Sunday, 2 being Monday etc) and another column for your image.
You’d then add to your layout a ticker based on that dataset, and set the filter so that the day of the week column is equal to DAYOFWEEK(NOW()) and then you’ll only get the rows that match that day of the week - and hence only the image you want.