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2.3.0 Released

Dan
18 Feb 20

We are pleased to announce our first release for the 2.3 version of Xibo. The codename for this version is “Wolf”.

14P/Wolf is a periodic comet with an orbital period of 8.74a (Julian years). Max Wolf (Heidelberg, Germany) discovered the comet on September 17, 1884. It is particularly interesting as its perihelion and orbital period change due to the influcence of Jupiter.

Layout Designer

The version 2 Layout Designer that was introduced in 2.0, received mixed reviews from users. Whilst the majority adapted to the changes and were appreciative of the new workflow, we found that some of our users have not been able to upgrade from 1.8 because the new designer did not fit their workflow. We listened to all feedback presented and made small improvements in 2.1 and 2.2 to act as a stop-gap whilst making the larger changes.

Xibo 2.3 represents the larger set of improvements, bringing the designer workflow more inline with 1.8 and addressing concerns raised by some of our users. We hope that 2.3 hits the spot with all of our users!

We have designed a simplified view with 3 elements instead of 4:

2.3_release

The top left designer window now operates in a similar manner to 1.8. You can view the contents of each Region with the preview arrows and in Edit mode you can drag/drop and add Regions.

The timeline has been reorganised to provide a clearer view of the play time of each Widget along with an overview of where the Region is situated on the Layout. You can also open a Playlist editor for each Region should you wish to edit those entries vertically in a similar interface to 1.8.

edit_playlist-1

The Library search has been redesigned as a popup window with tabs where you can add single or multiple items to any point in a Regions Playlist.

library_search

The Widget Toolbar has been redesigned to take up less space and to allow each user to add favourites for their most used Widgets so that they appear at the start of the list:

wolf-designer-toolbar

In addition we have gone over the user experience to improve the position of the buttons, and to make workflows operate with as few clicks as possible.

Playlist Manager

We have introduced a Playlist Manager dashboard which gives a user a simpler user interface to manage Library content on a Playlist.

An administrator configures a Sub-Playlist Widget to have one or more Playlists which the Playlist Manager User has permissions to edit, the dashboard will show them the number of Spots that has been configured and allow them to add/replace and optionally remove those items.

wolf-playlist-manager

Scheduling

We now support Geo-Scheduling such that each event can optionally have geo-data associated with it. Please note, we're hard at work adding support for GeoScheduling into our Player releases.

wolf-geo-schedule

Also, you can now delete a single occurence of a repeating Schedule Event.

Docker update

We have updated the base image for our Docker containers to Alpine 3.11 and PHP 7.3.13. This brings us continued security updates and support for the operating system and PHP.

The XMR container has also been updated with the latest Alpine 3.11 and XMR release-0.8 has been pushed into Docker Hub.

Others

We've added many other smaller things, for example a new Countdown Widget:

countdown_timer_module

You can view a change log of all things 2.3 in each development preview release announcement:

Download

UPDATE NOTE: We have released version 2.3.1 which fixes 24 issues found in v2.3. We highly recommend you download this updated version. For Download links please visit:
https://blog.xibo.org.uk/2-3-1-released/

Please use the links below to download the v2.3 release:

Xibo for Docker - Linux / Windows
Xibo for Apache/Nginx / WAMP/IIS

You may use any v2 compatible Player with this release. At the time of writing these are the latest:

1.8 series Players will also function but please be aware that new v2 features will not be supported.

Changelog

Changes since 2.3.0-rc1:

Future development

Our focus from now will be to move ahead with development of Xibo version 3, which will be our Interactive Signage release!