Recipe for Drupal CMS Digital Billboard system
Hardware:
Apple Mac Mini
Sony 52" LCD 1080p Display
Software:
Drupal 6
Custom Flash Drupal Interface to output XML
Flash (ActionScripting, Tweenlite, Fuse Kit)
Shell Scripting and Cron Jobs
Capabilities:
- Time on screen determined by CCK Field
- Re-order playlist determined by CCK Field
- Still Image Display (file attach)
- Canned Animated text (cck field) with image (file attach) template
- 1080p Video (flv, mov, mp4)
- News Ticker overlay (can be turned off or on, on a per playlist item basis).
- Current weather conditions downloaded from Yahoo's Weather API
- Current playlist status (last reload, currently playing, etc.)
... in other words it's a more capable slideshow flash App that uses XML to read what it should do which is output from Drupal.
Why Drupal? Why re-invent an almost perfectly extensible wheel? I know PHP, well, but not perfectly, but Drupal is rock solid, and I know how to pull the information out of it that I need. The front-end is user friendly enough for a copy writer to make changes on.