What is digital signage?Digital signage is a means of displaying content in public areas for informational or advertising purposes.
Digital screens are usually strategically positioned in areas of high footfall where they can target specific user groups with relevant and engaging content.
Background … Newcastle University first installed 70 digital screens in 2007,
powered by a bespoke PHP CMS.
Schools and departments were allowed to display up to 50% of their own content while the rest was provided by central sources.
… all sounds good, so why change it?
The problems! No ownership of the service - no responsibility taken for the
content
Very few regular content editors
Outdated, irrelevant content - messages from 2010 still visible in 2014!
Lack of flexibility – no choice of channels, prioritisation or customisation of the screens
Lack of editorial guidelines – no assistance on how to write messages for digital screens or the type of content to upload
Something had to change …
In 2013 the system was up for review – this meant either replace or remove
I was tasked with finding a suitable replacement – either by procuring a third party system or designing a bespoke application
… the first step was to engage with our users and find out their expectations of a digital signage platform …
Requirements gathering … Meetings were held with marketing and communications staff
around the university – this included existing and potential new users
The discussions revealed the following key requirements: Multiple channels of content (using existing feeds where possible) Content prioritisation Video playback with captioning Social media integration Multiple external news sources Promotional messages High-priority messages
What are the options? OneLAN
Pros – supports multiple content channels, screen-specific messages, video and full-screen imagery.
Cons – expensive bespoke content players, software not web-based (Windows application)
SignageLive Pros – inexpensive site licencing, multiple content channels, screen-specific
messages, web-based content editing app Cons – unintuitive outdated interface, difficult to administer
WordPress Pros – open source, very active developer community, plugins readily available for
most features Cons – requires very regular maintenance (due to popularity of platform security
vulnerabilities are discovered more frequently)
What did we choose?
We settled on WordPress, thanks to …
Readily available plugins for many required features
Digital signage theme readily available Ease of use and familiarity Ability to rapidly develop new features
Design - the platform WordPress with multisite enabled -
Each site is a ‘digital screen’ Scalable – any number of screens (sites) and users can be added
Design – content provision “Shared content” blog created -
Categories represent channels which can be subscribed to by other screens FeedWordPress auto-blogging plugin used to import RSS feeds as posts into specific
categories – this includes internal content and external news feeds
Using a bespoke plugin, screens can subscribe to any number of channels and external news sources - an equal amount of content is selected and displayed from each channel
Local content can be posted on individual screens (sites)
Internal units within the university can run their own channels – anyone can subscribe
All content in the system is made available as cached RSS and JSON - is used by other services including our mobile app
Design – user management
User accounts created using Add Multiple Users plugin User authentication handled with the Shibboleth SSO plugin
Design – the interface
Interface based on the excellent WordPress Digital Signage theme by Nate Jones - http://pixelydo.com/work/wordpress-digital-signage/
Bespoke plugin allows fullcustomisation of screens, including – Channels News ticker Social media Widgets Colour scheme
Maintenance … Simple for administrators to add new screens by creating a new site –
URL = PC hostname Site title = location of screen
Post Expirator plugin used to automatically expire and archive content
FeedWordPress plugin automatically removes posts no longer appearing on RSS feeds
OptimizeDB plugin cleans up the shared content blog database (drafts, deleted items, etc)
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