Screenly Cast: turn WordPress into a simple content creation tool for digital signage
We first built Screenly Cast back in 2016. The goal was to turn WordPress, the world's most popular CMS, into a simple content creation tool for digital signage. Then it sat unmaintained for years. It has now been rewritten and is back in the plugin directory.
The goal is still not to turn WordPress into a full-fledged signage CMS. No zones, no feeds, no playlists. Your player already does that. It does one thing: takes a post, page or image you already published and renders it for a screen.
Point a player at a normal page URL and you get navigation, a sidebar, comments, share buttons, and body text sized for someone holding a mouse. Not great on a wall. Append ?srly and the page takes a completely new shape: title, date, a short body, the featured image. Large, and readable from across the room.
A few things worth knowing:
- Content is trimmed to what actually fits at the resolution the screen actually is. A screen can't scroll and nobody is standing there to try.
- 800x480 up to 4K, landscape and portrait, no config. We didn't want to leave the Raspberry Pi Touch Display crowd hanging.
- CSS is compiled down to a Chrome 87 baseline, because signage hardware runs years behind the desktop.
- No external requests. Fonts are bundled, nothing from a CDN, which matters when a player is offline.
- It doesn't touch your theme. Renders are noindex.
One more thing. It's completely free and open source. It was originally built for Anthias, but a render is just a URL, so it works with basically any player that can render web.
Bug reports welcome.