This plug-in provides functionality to drive digital displays from Rock Content Channels. Each content channel gets one or more schedules applied to it via a Defined Value. A display device is registered in the system and is configured for which of those Defined Values it will display for. Each slide is cycled through on the display and the entire list is looped forever. When changes are made to the content channel or schedule the display will automatically detect those changes and update itself.

1. Create a new Content Channel called Generic Slides. Set the Type to Digital Signage and turn on Items Manually Ordered.
2. Create two Content Channel Items. Upload a different image into each item.
3. Go to your Defined Type page for Digital Sign Content Schedules.
4. Add a new Value titled Default Slides and select the Generic Slides content channel.
5. Go to your Check-in Devices page.
6. Add a new Device called Lobby and set the Device Type to Digital Display.
7. Once you set the type to Digital Display, the Content Schedules attribute will appear. Select the Default Slides option. Save the Device.
8. Open your web browser and navigate to http://rock.yourchurch.org/digitalsign
9. You will be informed that your kiosk is not recognized and given the IP address. Edit the Device you just created and put this IP address in and save the changes.
10. Refresh your browser and your slide show should begin.

A configured digital sign device simply displays an HTML page from Rock that handles all the fancy magic. All done purely in HTML5, CSS and Javascript. This means just about any modern web browser can be used as a display device.

Note: I said "modern". This means the web browser in your smart TV or Kindle probably won't work correctly - if at all.

The content displayed in the slideshow can be a mixture of images and videos. The images are uploaded directly into Rock while the videos are URL links to the video.

Each configured slideshow can also have background audio that is composed of MP3 files that have been uploaded into Rock.

There are a number of transitions between each slide that can be used and, by default, all transitions are enabled and randomly picked during each transition. These range from simple dissolves, slide effects all the way to page flips.

A plug-in that is simple to configure is an amazing plug-in. Sorry this plug-in is only a really good plug-in. Though once you get the concepts down you shouldn't have any trouble building up your perfect display system.

• All of the content (images, audio, videos) is stored in Content Channels.
• All of your display devices (computers) are setup as Devices in the Check-in Configuration section.
• Linking these two things together is a set of Defined Values that you will configure. These Defined Values (of type Digital Sign Content Schedules) let you configure schedules that are tied to the content channels. These will often referred to as just Content Schedules.

Each of the slide shows you configure (that is each Content Channel) has a few attributes that you can use to customize how that particular set of slides will appear and transition.

• Slide Interval - The number of seconds each slide will be displayed before going to the next slide. This must be at least 4 seconds and if not set then the value defined on the Block configuration will be used instead.
• Transitions - Which transitions will be used for this particular set of slides. If not set then the value defined in the Block configuration will be used instead.

When you define a device in Rock you specify the IP address that it has. The normal URL for a device to use is /digitalsign, such as http://rock.rocksolidchurchdemo.com/digitalsign. This will look for a device that matches the client's IP address.

There are times, however, when you might not be able to assign a static IP address to a computer or you want multiple computers to share the same configuration. A second way to access the URL is /digitalsign/## where the ## is the Rock Device Id number. Accessing this way will bypass the IP lookup and simply dish out the content for the requested device.

You shouldn't need to ever edit the block settings unless you are doing something pretty custom, but they are here for you anyway!

• Slide Interval - The number of seconds between slide transitions. This can be overridden by each individual content channel.
• Update Interval - How often, in seconds, will the block check for changes to the content that should be displayed.
• Transitions - The transitions that will be used by this page. If you want different devices to have different transitions you will need to configure a second page with different block settings. This can be overridden by each individual content channel.
• Content Channel Override - This is mostly used for testing but you can use it if you wish. Setting this overrides the content schedules completely and simply serves up the selected content channel at all times.

So let's assume that we want to have a set of generic slides that play during the week, and then another set that play during weekend services. We will call these two content channels Default Slides and Weekend Slides respectively.

When you create a content channel for use on a digital display it must inherit from the content channel type Digital Signage. This provides the needed attributes. So we have created our two content channels and populated them with the content we want displayed.

Next we will create two entries in our Digital Sign Schedules defined type. One will be called Weekend Slides and have the schedules selected for our weekend services along with the Weekend Slides content channel. The second will be called Default Slides, it will have no schedules selected and will have the Default Slides selected as the content channel. These are our Content Schedules.

Note: When a Content Schedule has no schedules then it is assumed to always match. Since these Content Schedules are matched top to bottom then this allows you to put a "catch-all" content channel at the end of your list.

With the above note in consideration, make sure your Default Slides defined value as at the bottom of the list.

You might be wondering why you can't just set the schedule on the content channel. There are two reasons. First is we need the ability to set a priority (order) for the content channels so that more specific schedules will be matched before broader schedules. The second is that you might want to have two screens showing the same content channel but at different schedules times. That brings us to our final piece to configure. The Digital Display device.

So now we have our content channels setup and the schedules for when they should be displayed. But we have not configured a kiosk device to display anything yet.

When you create a new Device (configured under the Admin Tools > Check-in > Devices page) and set it's type to Digital Display then a new attribute will become available called Content Schedules. This is a list checkboxes that each represent the Digital Sign Schedules that you have defined. For the moment lets setup a single device and select both Content Schedules that we created above. Our new kiosk device will now display the Weekend Slides content channel during service times and display the Default Slides content channel at any other time.

If we have a second kiosk display in a different building it can be configured to display different (or the same) Content Schedules. For example, lets say this second device is in the children's building while the first device was in the main worship center lobby. During service we want them to display the same Weekend Slides content channel. But during the week they have different slideshows to run. You can create a third content channel and call it Children's Default Slides, then create a new defined value of Digital Sign Schedules type with no schedule and reference your new content channel. (Remember to make sure this new one is also at the end of the list)

The first device we setup will not consider displaying these slides because you have not turned on that checkbox in it's configuration. When you create your new Device entry for the children's building you would select the Weekend Slides content schedule and the Children's Default Slides.

A final example would be a second campus that has different service times. We still want to show the same Weekend Slides but since they have different service times the Digital Sign Schedule entry we created will not work for them. All we need to do is create another scheduled entry with the proper schedule selected and the kiosk at that location will reference this new schedule and the Default Slides.

Below are some screenshots that show our final configuration.

Any image file will be automatically scaled to the resolution of the browser window. Smaller images will be scaled up and larger images will be scaled down. So you if you have displays running at different resolutions you can upload images at the highest supported resolution and they will be scaled properly.

You can also mix aspect ratios (some displays at 4:3 and some at 16:9). Any image will be resized to fit the entire image on screen with black bars added as needed.

Pretty much any image file type can be used. But you should limit yourself to standard web formats such as PNG or JPG.

If you want to throw in some videos for people to watch (audio is played too) then put the link to the video in the Slide Url attribute of the content channel item.

Note: If you enter anything in the Slide Url attribute then anything you attached to the Slide attribute will be ignored.

There is some special brains at work that will wait up to 10 seconds for the video to begin playing, and if that expires then it will move on to the next slide. Also once the video begins playing it will wait for the duration of the video plus 15 seconds at which point it will timeout again and move on to the next slide. This should prevent the slideshow from hanging up if a video gets stuck for some reason.

You can link directly to a .M4V or .MP4 file or play from a supported video provider:

• Vimeo
• Youtube

Note: Because we have to detect the type of link you enter only some of the URL formats for Vimeo and Youtube are supported (the most common ones). Also we assume that that URL for a raw video file will end with .m4v or .mp4 otherwise it might not detect properly.

You can add background audio to your slideshow. The only supported file type is MP3. You have two options for loading audio into the content channel. You can either enter a URL link to an MP3 file like you would a video file or you can upload your MP3 into the Slide attribute. You obviously won't get a preview image but it will actually work.

When the slideshow starts any MP3 files will be compiled into a playlist and played one after another and loop when the playlist ends. If there a video slide comes up then the audio will fade out and then fade back in once the video has finished.

The following query string paremeters are available to override certain default functionality.

• Audio - true or false. If false then all audio (background audio and video audio) will be muted.

This plug-in has been tested with the following browsers:

• Chrome 59.0.3071.115 for Windows
• Edge 40.15063.0.0
• Firefox 54.0.1 for Windows
• Firefox 49.0.2 for Mac
• Internet Explorer 11.483.15063.0 ¹
• Porteus-Kiosk 4.4.0 with Firefox
• Safari for Mac 10.12
• Safari Mobile² for iOS 10.3

Other versions of browsers and clients will probably work too. These are just the ones that we have explicitly tested.

And seriously. What is with these web browser version numbers. Could they get any longer?

Known Issues

1. Internet Explorer does not work handle the 3D transitions properly.
2. Safari Mobile will not allow auto-play of video or audio, so only still images will work.