About this plugin
Screenly Cast turns WordPress into a simple content creation tool for digital
signage, and for Screenly in particular.
It deliberately does not try to make WordPress into a digital signage CMS. There
are no zones, no feeds and no playlists. It does one thing: it takes a post, page
or image you have already published and renders it so it reads well on a screen
nobody is standing next to.
That covers most of what a screen on a wall is actually for: a digital notice
board in a school or an office, opening hours and a menu board in a café, a lobby
display, or a Raspberry Pi in kiosk mode showing whatever you published this
morning.
Point a screen at an ordinary page URL and it shows the signage view. Recognized
signage players are detected from their request and sent to the signage version
of whatever they asked for, so there is nothing to remember and nothing to edit.
srly still works, and still wins, which is what you want for
previewing on your own machine.
A signage render is the title, the date, a short body, and the featured image if
there is one. Everything that assumes a person with a mouse is removed:
navigation, sidebars, comments, links, sharing buttons.
Your theme is never touched. A signage request renders through the plugin’s
own template and leaves your site’s active theme exactly as it was. Earlier
versions of this plugin switched the whole site’s theme when a signage URL was
requested; that is gone. See the changelog.
Some specifics, because they are the difference between “works” and “works on a
wall”:
- Fits the screen. Content is trimmed to what actually fits, at the
resolution the screen actually is. A screen cannot scroll and nobody is there
to try.
- Every resolution, both orientations. Correct from an 800×480 Raspberry Pi
Touch Display up to 4K, in landscape and portrait, with no configuration.
- Works on old players. Signage hardware is often years behind the desktop.
The stylesheet is compiled down to a Chrome 87 baseline, and players below that
get a reduced-motion mode rather than a broken layout.
- No external requests. Fonts are bundled with the plugin. Nothing is fetched
from a CDN, which matters both for privacy and because a player is frequently
offline.
- Not indexed. Signage renders are marked noindex, so they do not compete
with your real pages in search results.
Works with Screenly and
Anthias out of the box. Because a signage render
is just a URL, it works the same way on Yodeck, Xibo, OptiSigns, ScreenCloud,
Rise Vision, Signagelive, BrightSign, IAdea and any other player, wallboard or
Chrome kiosk that can open a web page. Those are other companies’ products and
are not affiliated with Screenly; they are listed because the plugin genuinely
works with them.
The source code is on GitHub. Contributions and bug reports are welcome.
Support
For support, feature requests and bug reports, please use the
GitHub Issues page.