Playlists Blueprint

[dan]

Introduction

The title of the blueprint and a short description of what the feature is.

Status

The current status and the username of the:

• Reporter (@alexharrington)
• Drafter (@alexharrington & @dasgarner)
• Implementer (@dasgarner)

User Story

I’d really like a new media type which was itself a timeline with media items added to it (like an RSS feed almost) but that individual items could be scheduled on to.

That new “content stream” could then be loaded in to any region - possibly alongside other normal media items.

This is hugely powerful, as you could have a content stream for “posters” which you then add in to a region one three or four layouts once. Then as each media item in the content stream hits the start of its schedule period, it appears, and when it’s out of its schedule period, it’s removed automatically.

Empty content streams should not be rendered.

— Eduardo Ribeiro - can’t register/login in the wiki…

I would like to see this idea expanded:

Define ‘channels’: they correspond to a possible area in a layout.
A channel can be part of more than one layout. (optional, but it would be cool to have)
A channel has a list of content to display (content-stream/timeline).

Simplify media management:

• Uploaded media doesn’t need a duration: the display duration comes from the timeline.
• Users can only see the media they upload. And can only edit if it isn’t part of a timeline.
• When someone uploads content they define the ‘channel’ for that media.
• On upload the user defines the start and end dates to show the content.
• Normal users don’t see a timeline they only see the list of their uploaded content and an indication of approved/not approved/rejected and on display/not displaying.

Moderation:

• Every channel has a list of users that can post to it and a list of moderators than control the flow of media in that channel.
• Only moderators can approve and edit timeline options: order , duration of media elements, etc. they can also confirm the starting and ending dates defined by the uploader.
• Moderators see a list of all the content that is part of the media stream for a channel, just like the current timelines but with the extra option to approve/not approve an item.
• Items would be shown as ‘approved’/‘not approved’/‘rejected’ and ‘displaying/not displaying/expired’.

Simplify permissions system:

• Users can only see their content and submit to assigned channels, moderators can manage all content for the channels they are assigned to.

Kristoph: I’d like user group level security on content streams, so I could have a set of users who could only edit the media timeline etc and not change any settings or modify the layout. Also would be nice if that security could be set per display or per group of displays, so I could have users which could only modify the content on 1 group of displays etc.

Implementation

Essentially all regions will become content streams. XMDS and the client will then cooperate to show items in that “region” in a date/time aware nature. This means that the client will now receive a fromDT and toDT value for each media item - such that it knows when to start and stop including that item in the region.

This means that you’ll be able to reuse a “playlist” across multiple layouts.

##Items that always appear
fromDT can be effectively infinite - this value shall be 2000-01-01 00:00.
toDT can be infinite - the infinite value shall be 2050-12-31 00:00.
If the client encounters these dates, it will consider the item to be valid for display always.

Effected Software

All

DB Schema Changes

Any necessary DB Schema Changes

[dan]

Playlists Generator

I know we’re developing the playlist functionality. Already thinking about innovation, I believe we have a beautiful complement to this functionality. Playlist Generator. We may use the tags of the files, creating the playlist, we can inform the tags we want, and automatically all content containing this tag would be included. The user could remove or add additional items. This creates greater interactivity and use of tags in the system, currently only used in filters and groupers. What do…

[dan]

Sub-Playlist - (Add-on-Playlists)

Hello Dan, Already thinking about the operation of the Playlist. I analyzed some market software such as Scala. They have a concept of Sub-Playlist, which allows a playlist part of another playlist. Example: Currently we can include media content within a playlist. The Scala also allows you to include a playlist as other content, thereby generating facility organization and automation to the user.

[dan]

It has also been noted that while we are working on this feature we also put in a better UI for longer lists.

[Thomas_Poli]

Hy guys,
more or less when will be delivered this feature?

Thanx

[dan]

1.9 release - which we will start development on in the next few months. It will be delivered initially in an alpha release, which will become stable depending entirely on how much we decide to put in it.

1.9.0-alpha, most likely around August/September 2017. I wouldn’t expect a stable 1.9 before 2018.

[pablogag]

Hi Dan, can you please update the status of this functionality?, we are using 1.8.9 version, is there any part of this that we can use in production right now?

The main issue we have is to be able to set “exceptions” to a campaing schedule, at layout level.

For example, we have a campaign that is scheduled always, but we want to limit specific layouts, to be unpublished in a specific day. Imagine that we have a campaign with 20 layouts, and we have to unpublish only 3 of them in a specific day, in order to do this right now, we would have to split the campaign, and the scheduling becomes much more complex.

Thank you very much

[dan]

Github issue for this Feature

Issue: Playlists

[Gyro]

Hi Dan!
do we have any release schedule for version 2?
Please inform if we do!!

Many thanks!!