screenly / screenly-cast-for-wordpress

A WordPress plugin for digital signage.

Screenly Cast for WordPress

A WordPress plugin to enable easy and beautiful casting of pages, posts and image media on Screenly digital signage devices.

The Screenly Cast plugin optimizes your website content for beautiful, easy to read display on TVs and other non-interactive devices.

Without Screenly Cast for WordPress:

With Screenly Cast for WordPress:

Installing

• Search for Screenly Cast in the WordPress plugin directory
• Activate the plugin

Usage with Screenly Pro

Check out our video introduction to Screenly Cast for WordPress:

To make use of the plugin on your Screenly Screen you just need to follow these simple steps:

1. Make sure the plugin is activated.
2. Copy and Paste the URL of your website, post, page or attachment.
3. Change the URL, adding a parameter called srly, like this: - https://www.mydomain.com/?srly - https://www.mydomain.com/my-post-url?srly - https://www.mydomain.com/my-page-url?srly - https://www.mydomain.com/my-attachment-url?srly - https://www.mydomain.com/?somevar=1&anothervar=2&srly - In case your using more than one parameter - Note: There is no need to apply any value to the parameter. It just needs to exist on the query.
4. Login to Screenly and navigate to Assets on the top menu.
5. Click on the button + Add Asset.
6. Select the tab URL.
7. Paste the edited URL (from step 3).
8. Hit Save.
9. On the asset detail page, make sure to set a recognizable title since this is what you will see in Screenly later.
10. Go to the Playlists section and add the new asset. Make sure to pick an appropriate Duration for a good reading experience.
11. Hit Save.
12. Profit.

For detailed instructions, check out this Medium post.

Screenly Cast for WordPress should also work just fine with most other digital signage solutions, but the usage will vary.

How it works

The plugin comes with a simple theme that will be used specifically for Screenly content. The plugin detects the srly parameter in your URL, like in http://www.myblog.com/?srly, and applies the template. A template_include filter is used to activate the plugin's theme files. Your content will be rendered using the Screenly theme, without affecting your normal theme still in use for the rest of your site.

Because the plugin targets Screenly devices with no end user interaction, content will be laid out in a simple and TV friendly layout. Just the title, content and featured image are used. The plugin automatically simplifies the markup and removes functionality not appropriate for the medium. For example, since there is no interaction, any clickable links is simplified to just the title text.

For the best experience for your reader you should assume that no more than 250 characters or so will be displayed. Screenly Cast does not try to automatically scroll the content because for these non-interactive, often large TV displays, fixed unmoving content usually looks and reads the best.

Development

To setup a local development, simply install Docker and:

• Run docker-compose up from the root of the repository.
• Navigate to https://localhost:8000.
• Create your account and activate the plugin.

Please note that you do not need to install the plugin from the plugin directory. The code plugin folder is automatically added to the WordPress installation. All you need to do is to activate the plugin.

screenly-cast-for-wordpress's Issues

Screenly clearing CSS Customizations

We have been trying Screenly to use in our school to pull content from our website to display on lobby signage. We have noticed that when active, the screenly theme appears to be clearing our main website theme's customized css styling. Is there a way to prevent this?

Screenly Cast for WordPress(on Wamp) not Working

Migrated from this Screenly OSE ticket:
Screenly/Anthias#630

Parse Error

I left this on WP also...sorry for the repetition.

I am getting the following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '[' in /home/content/40/8060140/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/screenly-cast/inc/screenly-cast-settings.php on line 45

This loads in place of the site. Removing the plugin restores the site.

I've looked at the plugin, but I know zero about coding, so I can't really tell if something is wrong there or not.

(I'm on the latest WP...4.8)

Updated for Wordpress 6

Do we have an updated for wordpress 6 yet?

Ability to srly a category or tag

Currently only the first entry in a category or tag is displayed when ?srly is added.
It would be nice if there would be an animation or switch between the entries. So it wouldn't be necessary to add every single entry to the asset list.

Screenly breaks site theme

Hi,

Thank you for this plugin but…
The plugin switches the current theme to the screenplay theme. This causes an error when a user simultaneously uses the website in a “normal” way. As the theme switch also changes the wp-options table entry to the screenly theme the load of the normal theme is in error.
The theme-switch functionality in Wordpress is not atomic.
I had to setup an explicit theme-switch in my current theme to resolve this. This is a major issue when using the theme-switch function in WordPress.

Do you have plans to develop an android app to display plugin content?

Do you have plans to develop an android app to display plugin content?

Add support for WordPress 5

WordPress 5 is around the corner. We need to make sure the plugin works well with this version.

Write tests

We already have the test infrastructure setup with Travis (which we use for deployments to WordPress.org). We should, however, add some tests at some point.

Add plugin icon

The plugin is currently missing an icon. The documentation for this can be found here.

Add screenshots

We're currently missing screenshots of the plugin. Documentation can be found here.

I suggest we create one before and one after screenshot for each asset type we support.

Wordpress HTML ERROR 500

Hi,

Id like to use your new plugin with love.
But after serveral tries i give up installing the plugin.

After i enable it it just crashes my wordpress.

Do you have a fix?

Here is a screenshot

Text scale template

Hi im back again hehehe.

I found out that when displaying a page on screenly tv the text will show up way to small.
Can i fix this easy? i was thinking of editing your css file in screenly plugin folder but i will ask it first.

Thnx

Ability to change the style

I would be greate if there were the options to change the colors and other CSS settings of the style.

Additionally an option to hide the date would be wonderful.

Image with text overlay does not appear to work

When filing a bug, please include the following headings if possible. Any example text in this template can be deleted.

Overview of the Issue

I created a post on my Wordpress site (with Screenly plugin installed) with some text and then added an image using the 'Add Media' button on the Edit Post page. If I go to that page in a browser with the URL without ?srly I can see the image and my text with my website's normal template surrounding it.
If I add ?srly to the URL I just get the text with no background image which is contrary to what the documentation says at
https://www.screenly.io/blog/2017/05/31/introducing-screenly-cast-for-wordpress/?source=collection_home---4------0-----------

Reproduction Steps

Add Screenly Wordpress plugin to your Wordpress site.
Create a new post by adding heading and some text. Click 'Add Media' button and pick an image.
Click 'Update' button to update the site.
Browse over to the URL, image and text will appear with the default website template.
Add ?srly to the URL, only text will appear with no background image

Environment

Running Wordpress 4.9.7 on linux server not sure which version of linux
http://fplex.org
Using both Chrome and Firefox on Mac to browse to the website.

Implement automatic push to WordPress.org via Travis

The plugin is served upstream via SVN. However, since we don't want to use SVN to track the code repository, we need to have a hook in Travis (or similar) to do this push.

There's an article here with an example of this. It needs to be modified, but it's a good inspiration.