CampusMessagingWORDPRESS-POWERED DIGITAL SIGNAGE AT NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY

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Outdated, irrelevant content - messages from 2010 still visible in 2014!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messages, web-based content editing app Cons – unintuitive outdated interface, difficult to administer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)

Live demo time!

Fingers crossed

That’s all, folks!