Schedule for school with A & B days

What would you all suggest for creating a schedule (or playlist?) to implement something along these lines:

A Day:

  • 8:00am get to class layout
  • 8:15am-9:00am default campus layout (1st period)
  • 9:00am-9:10am countdown layout
  • 9:10am-10:00 default campus layout (2nd period)
    ( continue this pattern until 3:30pm)

B Day:

  • 8:00am get to class layout
  • 8:15am-9:00am default campus layout (5th period)
    (continue same pattern as above until 3:30pm)

The schedule will need to skip weekends and scheduled holidays AND always alternate A Day, B Day, A Day, B Day, etc…

Hmmm. This is challenging. The easiest out of the box thing I could think of for exactly what you asked is to create the appropriate layouts and manually schedule the occurrences monthly or biweekly to accommodate the coming schedule. There are recurrences in Xibo, but the need to omit certain days is not something I’ve seen that could be accommodated easily.

If you have a programmer, you may be able to use the Xibo API to upload a schedule or you could somehow tie it into whatever master schedule you use to plan the schedule patterns to automatically set the correct layouts each day. Also possible with a programmer, you could create external dynamic content and use the Xibo ‘webpage’, ‘embed’, or even the ‘dataset’ modules to display that content. I personally do this at my job using the webpage module. I built a webpage that goes into the employee scheduling system that serves as a staff locator (so we can see where on campus we could expect people to be for IT support dispatch). The webpage that highlights the staff’s current assignments and projects forward to their next ones. All of this logic is done on the webpage with PHP and JavaScript and the result is just shown as a webpage in Xibo.

Finally, the easiest, but it’s not exactly what you asked for but you could also just accommodate both A/B patterns on a single layout, but have an element of the layout be a monthly/weekly calendar identifying what days are what pattern.

Ultimately you can do exactly what you want, just not out of the box with the way your schedule goes. I’d toss this to the Xibo team as a feature request – the ability to ‘schedule a schedule’ – basically have a full day’s schedule that could be set to run on a series of days as opposed to either one day or an inflexible recurrence.

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Are you available for hire to help with this? If not, do you know of someone who can?