Digital Signage with Drupal and Meteor

Mark Shropshire (@shrop)

Digital Signage

Digital signage ues a combination of content management and playback software to display content on screens and displays of all sizes

Spectacle

• Open source digital signage publishing system

• Content management using Drupal https://drupal.org/project/spectacle

• Content playback using Meteorhttps://github.com/shrop/spectacle-frontend

• famo.us for layout and animations

Spectacle

• Spectacle is being developed in the open with partners through the Charlotte Drupal User Group and Meteor Charlotte

• Sponsored by

• Classic Graphics

• SUAR at UNC Charlotte

Spectacle Use Cases

• Event marketing and organization news

• Retail advertising

• Conference room event listings

• Interactive directories and maps

Why Meteor?

• Drupal is strong for content management. Let’s not try to recreate those capabilities in another system.

• Meteor is perfect for building realtime applications

• Allows us to use technologies like famo.us

Why Meteor?

“Meteor is an open-source platform for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you're an expert developer or just getting started.”

https://meteor.com

Why Meteor?

Seven Principles of Meteor

• Data on the Wire

• One language

• Database Everywhere

• Latency Compensation

• Full Stack Reactivity

• Embrace the Ecosystem

• Simplicity Equals Productivity

Source: http://docs.meteor.com/#sevenprinciples

Why Meteor?

Database Web server

Traditional web applications

DataClientHTTP

Request

Why Meteor?

Database Meteor server

Meteor web applications

DataClient

Initial package

Polling

Data updates

Local DB write (sync)DB writes (async)

DDP(Distributed Data Protocol)

• Data on the wire

• RPC from client to server

• Client subscriptions to sets of documents

• JSON objects/EJSON field specifications

Creating a Meteor app

meteor create myNewAppmyNewApp: created.!To run your new app: cd myNewApp meteor

cd myNewAppmeteor

=> Meteor server running on: http://localhost:3000/

$

$$

[[[[[ ~/Sites/myNewApp ]]]]]

Spectacle Content Types

Term reference

Spectacle Templates

Template Concept

Template Concept

Template Concept

Template Concept

Demos!

• Drupal for content management

• Meteor for content playback

Questions?

Monitor the Charlotte Drupal User Group and Meteor Charlotte for upcoming sprints

http://www.meetup.com/charDUG http://www.meetup.com/meteor-charlotte