What to look forward to in 1.7 and beyond

The Xibo Project is fast approaching a stable 1.7 release of Xibo named “Tuttle” and we’d like to let our community know what to expect and what to look forward to.

**2013 – **At the start of 2013 we had some good news for Xibo and we wrote about it in our blog post “Upcoming in 2013“. Between then and now our remit for 1.5/1.6 grew into something much larger and resulted in 10 releases packed with new features.

2014 – Another exciting year for Xibo which has resulted in Spring Signage being able to provide full time development resources for Xibo. These resources came on-line in August 2014 and allowed us to speed up the improvement of the product and the products quality. In only 3 months we have a new website, new “Xibo in the Cloud” services, two 1.6 bug fixing releases and two alpha releases of 1.7 (“Tuttle”).

**1.7 **– our focus for Xibo 1.7 has been usability. We want to shake off our “digital signage for tech people” image and become the “digital signage for everyone” solution that our tag line promises. To do this we have had to re-engineer a number of Xibo processes as well as focus more on the user experience.

Here are some of the things you can expect to see in 1.7:

• A new CMS theme.
• Help on every form field.
• A new installer and  updater with more information.
• A better calendar.
• More translations, fewer gaps.
• Simplified client installation.
• Centralised client settings.
• More modules (clock, weather).
• Multi-select for key transactions.
• Better layout design experience.
• The usual general bug fixes, patches and improvements.

We hope to have 1.7 fully released as a stable version early 2015.

1.8 – code named “Tempel”, 1.8 is our future release that we have targeted for stable release in summer 2015. The exact roadmap is still being developed but we have 2 key objectives to meet with this release:

• Playlists within regions – reusable playlists with start/end dates that exist inside a region and can be reused across multiple layouts.
• Interactive Signage – events (buttons, sensors, rs232, bluetooth) to trigger actions in Xibo (layout changes, playlist changes in regions).

We are very grateful to the Xibo community for the support with reporting bugs, asking and answering questions and Xibo for Android purchases. We hope that the above is as exciting for new and existing users as it is for us.