3.0.0-alpha Released

We are pleased to announce the release of our first development preview for the 3.0 version of Xibo. The codename for this version is “Finlay”.

15P/Finlay is a periodic comet with an orbital period of 6.51a (Julian years). William Henry Finlay (Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa) discovered the comet on September 26, 1886. It's last closest approach to the sun was in December 2014 and is on it's way back in July 2021.

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

API Improvements

Although it sounds technical, the Xibo API sits at the heart of the platform and runs the web portal as well as external integrations. In this release we have overhauled the API so that we're using latest technologies and frameworks.
We have:

• Updated to Slim4
• Updated our support libraries for Sanitization and Exception Handling
• Updated oAuth2 to issue JWT access tokens and use public key encryption
• Updated to Alpine 3.11
• Updated to PHP 7.2.9

Interactivity

3.0 will lay the foundations for interactivity in Xibo, and in this alpha we have focused on the CMS side changes to enable this functionality. In the current global climate it might seem strange to be actively working on an interactivity component, but for Xibo interactivity doesn't just mean touch!

We have introduced a new concept called Actions which can be attached to a Layout, Region or Widget, and can be used to effect changes to the Layout. These can be triggered by Touch certainly, but also programatically by webhook.

A good example of where this could be useful is on a product display which has a product the customer can pick up. An "internet of things" device such as a light sensor could be used to trigger a webhook to Xibo which loads that products information into a Region.

In the current global climate, access control systems are springing up everywhere - the output of a temperature sensor could be fed into Xibo Actions to show relevant messaging.

Web Portal

In 3.0 we have included numerous improvements and fixes to the web portal, including:

• a new date/time picker
• better Jalali calendar support
• Geo filtering for the schedule agenda
• Layout Locking to prevent two users editing the same Layout concurrently
• Commands can have command strings which apply to all Displays, and the Display Profile command string is now an override.
• Showing effective permissions for a User (including their permissions which come from groups)

Widgets

We have 2 new Widgets to try out:

• World Clock
• Weather Tiles
• and we have included a new marquee implementation for Players using the latest Chrome engine.

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 3.0.0 release for those of you running without Docker in due course.

• Xibo for Docker - Linux / Windows

Changelog

27 issues have been addressed in this release!

• 2246: Commands: Ease of use improvements
• 2202: Marquee: Investigate if there are any improved ways of doing this
• 2198: Schedule Agenda: Geo-Filter
• 2194: Embedded HTML Widget - add copy button
• 2189: Size limit for datasets
• 2183: Add start/end date to decide a future run date for report schedule
• 2161: Jalali Calendar Overhaul
• 2156: Refactor Cypress tests for 3.0
• 2155: World Clock improvements and fixes
• 2140: WebOS license versions shown in the CMS need to be renamed as 'WebOS 1.8 R19 ' instead of ' lg 1.8 R19 '
• 2033: Update league/oauth2_server to newest version
• 1909: Users: Page Security show effective permissions
• 1310: Implement Xibo Support library for Sanitisation/Validation
• 385: World Clock
• 57: CMS Forcast.io ease of use
• 2190: Layout Designer: Implement the Interactive Drawer
• 2181: System User
• 2171: Layout lock feature
• 2159: Interactive: Actions BE
• 2158: Interactive: Layout Drawer BE
• 2154: Test coverage for Stats
• 2169: Twig: Filter for url_decode
• 2168: Calendar Module: Empty Interval value throws a warning message
• 2167: Ticker Module: PHP count shows warning for no results
• 608: Templates aren't always applicable to all effects
• 2043: Schedule Page: Adjust calendar to the CMS time
• 2278: Users: Improve the terminology used when describing page permissions

Future development

We will focus on collecting feedback and making improvements to version 3 and aim to release a 3.0.0-beta in due course!