Digital Signage with Drupal and Meteor

Digital signage is popping up eveywhere on small and large screens. Industries and institutions such as government, retail, and education are finding it a great way to list events, advertise specials, and display general information. Spectacle is an open source digital signage publishing system for displaying content on any screen. The content is administered by Drupal and displayed using Meteor.

This presentation will demonstrate the advantages of using Drupal for digital signage content managent and Meteor to playback scheduled content. In addition to a full demo of Spectacle, attendees will technically dive into how Drupal and Meteor are integrated using Meteor’s realtime DDP protocol (No need for old-fashioned RESTful web services). If you have been curious about Meteor in general or how Meteor and Drupal can work together to provide the best experience, this is the presentation for you.

Transcript

1. Digital Signage with Drupal and Meteor Mark Shropshire (@shrop)
2. Digital Signage Digital signage ues a combination of content management and playback software to display content on screens and displays of all sizes
3. Spectacle • Open source digital signage publishing system • Content management using Drupal
 https:/ /drupal.org/project/spectacle • Content playback using Meteor
 https:/ /github.com/shrop/spectacle-frontend • famo.us for layout and animations
4. 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
5. Spectacle Use Cases • Event marketing and organization news • Retail advertising • Conference room event listings • Interactive directories and maps
6. 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
7. 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
8. 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
9. Why Meteor? Database Web server Traditional web applications Data Client HTTP Request
10. Why Meteor? Database Meteor server Meteor web applications Data Client Initial package Polling Data updates Local DB write (sync) DB writes (async)
11. DDP
 (Distributed Data Protocol) • Data on the wire • RPC from client to server • Client subscriptions to sets of documents • JSON objects/EJSON field specifications
12. Creating a Meteor app meteor create myNewApp myNewApp: created. ! To run your new app: cd myNewApp meteor cd myNewApp meteor => Meteor server running on: http://localhost:3000/ $ $ $ [[[[[ ~/Sites/myNewApp ]]]]]
13. Spectacle Content Types Term reference
14. Spectacle 
 Templates
15. Template Concept
16. Template Concept
17. Template Concept
18. Template Concept
19. Demos! • Drupal for content management • Meteor for content playback
20. Questions? Monitor the Charlotte Drupal User Group and Meteor Charlotte for upcoming sprints http:/ /www.meetup.com/charDUG
 http:/ /www.meetup.com/meteor-charlotte