Key improvements for 4.1

Inside Xibo
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It has been just over 2 months since our release of 4.0 and I think it is fair to say the whole team at Xibo could not have been busier since! A huge 17% of known users have made the leap over to 4.0, which represents a huge increase over the uptake of 3.0 when it was released.

It certainly hasn’t all been good news and plain sailing; there were a lot of changes in 4.0 and we realise now that we needed to do a much better job of communicating these ahead of time. We have learnt from this experience and will make the release of 4.1, 5.0, etc smoother as a result.

Since releasing 4.0 we have tried to plug the gap in our communication via a series of “Inside Xibo” articles explaining the decisions we made, and some handy guides to take users through the changes. These are available here for reference:

We have also accelerated our release cycle for patches so that we could get fixes out to our users as fast as possible; during this time the team have fixed over 100 issues.

Pain points

We are fortunate and grateful to have such a wonderful community, who take the time to explain their use cases and issues to us in such detail. There are 2 key points that have been raised consistently.

HTML/CSS

When we designed the changes we were planning for 4.0 we put our users into two buckets:

  • Non technical content creators
  • Developers

For the content creators we tried to create a simplified layout editing experience with drag and drop elements, and for developers we tried to create an extensible and powerful XML definition for modules and templates. Over the last 2 months it has become clear that there is a 3rd group of users who sit in the middle; familiar with HTML/CSS and comfortable using those technologies on layouts.

These users need to have easy access to the new suite of developer tools to both enable their old workflows and to enhance what they can achieve with Xibo in the future. Xibo CMS 4.1 will have a built in module/template editor which enables this.

The Shortcomings with Elements

In Xibo 4.0 we introduced Elements; our brand new way of working with widgets that have data. We believe that this system is already powerful and has huge potential, but there are two key areas we can improve in future releases.

Firstly 4.1 will have more stencils and widgets to choose from, making it easier to quickly drop in a data widget which looks good, and improving the different data widgets available. It will also be possible to save a group of elements you’ve already designed as a stencil for reuse.

Secondly from 4.0.6 you will be able to add more than one of the same data widget to a layout. This is an essential feature for widgets such as DataSet and Menu Board, but also useful for all types of widget.

In conclusion

4.1 development will start shortly and wrap up in the early part of 2024. If there is something you particularly want to see solved, let us know and we will consider it for inclusion. Aside from the things discussed here we will be working on:

  • Layout sharing and embedding (for embedding layouts directly into websites, direct linking in emails, social media, etc)
  • Scheduling criteria (for weather and tag triggered scheduling)
  • Real-time data widgets (for displaying live data on players)

In the meantime we will continue to patch bugs and minor enhancements into 4.0.

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Hi,

I would love to see an option as the Admin to be able to go to the Users section and be able to click on a user and login as them. It would make it easier to help a user when you can see what they are seeing.

Thank you,
John

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And: Actions also as GET Request, not only as http POST request :slight_smile:

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All elements and visuals on the design side need to be given the direction to translate the components. We are waiting for the ability to flip images on the design side. :slight_smile:

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A HDMI input in the player for Windows would be great!
Or a good working rtsp or rtmp functionality!
Also editing the Rss feeds how it is displayed would be very nice

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please, insert devices sync feature, It’s too much of a necessity :wink:

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Hi, would love to see the ability to display live TV video from Set top boxes, Cable/Satellite boxes, or IPTV using a HDMI or USB capture device or direct network streams into the Playlist on the Windows media players.

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Please bring back the old version of the “Schedule” menu.
This new “Schedule” menu is proportionally as complicated as the old layout editors, which were excellently simplified in V4.

Another very important point is to bring back the freedom to consume custom tags from RSS/XML feeds, especially to insert more than one image tag in the same ticker.

The limitation of tags prevents a wide range of well-crafted layouts with various utilities. In terms of the module’s usefulness, I consider it a mistake to limit it the way it was done.

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What do you mean by the “old schedule menu”?

I understand your point, but once they have completely custom structures these are not really RSS feeds anymore?

We always intended that customised sources of data would be implemented using the new developer tools. You’d have a custom module, data type and module template which is exactly designed to render your XML feed.

Is there any value in using a DataSet to import your custom feed? Are the tools there even powerful enough to achieve that for you?

Happy to look at an example feed if you have one you can share.

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I certainly hope the Xibo Team has plugged the issue with layouts breaking and crashing the player (showing Element has No Data) and the loss of the ability to display when there is no data to display.

I was forced to rebuild the server and return to the old 3.x version (including uninstalling all the players and returning to the old version.

I will be remaining on the old 3.x version until I am sure that the new version is working and is a real improvement.

This is the first time that Xibo has dropped the ball so badly!

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I have no knowledge of this problem.
Have you opened a post, to this forum, about it?

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You can already display an HDMI input, with webOS/Tizen players and some Android embedded devices.

It’s also possible to display an RSTP stream with the “video in” widget.

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The link is here.

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We have a plan which we will implement for 4.1 for how to solve this for the new Elements functionality. If you use module templates instead of elements it works how it used to - you supply a no data message. There were some issues with this on release, which we’ve fixed.

I don’t recall having an issue with players crashing, although you are right they certainly did revert to the default layout or splash screen when this No Data case occurred. Certainly we know of no current issues here.

Sorry you’ve had such a poor experience. We recommend and encourage trying out and testing major version changes before upgrading your production network. Major version changes, v2 → v3 → v4 will contain substantial differences in how the solution works.

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Hi,

Could you give us some insight on the 4.1 version development. As stated in the thread it should wrap up early part of 2024, is it maybe already planned for release if so when?
We would like to upgrade to v4 on our production Server but are unable to, due to the missing feature of adding HTML/CSS to layouts. This feature is used in almost all of our layouts and essential to us.

Thanks in advance.

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We are close to making an alpha release available to our beta testers - see About the Beta category if you want to join that program.