2.2.0-alpha2 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of our second development preview for the 2.2 version of Xibo. The codename for this version is “Olbers”.

13P/Olbers is a periodic comet with an orbital period of 69 years. The comet was discovered on March 6, 1815 and it will next come to perihelion on June 30, 2024.

2.2.0-alpha2 is a development preview only and should not be used in production. You can upgrade to this release from 1.8/2.x series.

Main Focus

The main focus for 2.2 is to improve the scheduling capabilities of Xibo. 2.2.0-alpha2 brings the following new features and improvements:

• Emailed PDF Scheduled Reports
• Auto-publish option for Layouts
• Search the Schedule by Layout
• Search Layouts by Display/Display Group
• A new "spacer" Widget to empty a Region for a number of seconds
• Default Transition to apply to all Widgets
• "Read Only" view for Published Layouts with access to other areas of the CMS
• A number of bug fixes from 2.1 and 2.0

We have added the following features to the CMS which will be implemented in each Player in due course:

• Force HTTPS connection to the CMS
• Move a Display between CMS instances

Scheduling: Interrupt Layout

Xibo 2.2 will introduce a new concept to its already extensive feature set. This feature, called Interrupt Layouts, will be a new type of event that can be created from the Schedule Calendar.

Interrupt Layouts will have a "share of voice" setting indicting how much in any hour period that Layout should be played. You can only have 1 active at any time.

As the name implies, an Interrupt Layout will interrupt your usual schedule, switch to playing from the Interrupt Layout for a period of time (calculated depending on the share of voice) and then switch back to the pre-interrupt content.

2.2.0-alpha2 includes the CMS side changes for this new feature, Player changes will follow as updated Players are released. This is an exciting new scheduling capability and we're looking forward to having it available on all Players.

Download

We're making this alpha available for people to try using our recommended installation method, Docker. We will be providing release files for the stable 2.2.0 release for those of you running without Docker in due course.

• Xibo for Docker - Linux / Windows

Future development

Our immediate development work will be to prepare a 2.2.0-beta release which will add more polish to all the features we've put in 2.2 so far. We will also be responding to your feedback and any bug reports.

Beyond 2.2 we've begun planning 2.3, which will focus on bringing together all of the feedback we've had in version 2.