The Concerto Project

Concerto is an open source digital signage platform that I developed with many great people at my university. Since its launch in 2008, Concerto has been used by many people around the world for digital advertising billboards, art installations, and information sharing networks. As the project grew, those of us responsible for creating the software (the "Concerto Core Team") saw the need for having an official website for the project. Concerto-Signage.org was born. The initial site was launched in 2009, and two years later in 2011 we re-launched it with a refreshed web application and new features.

The site serves as a resource by providing tutorials, deployment information, and links to disk images and other files needed to get parts of the platform up and running on your own hardware. Right from the beginning, we put up a Google Group to act as a forum for the project. My colleague Brian Michalski put up a hosted demo version of the software for visitors to try. Originally, the blog for the university-based group we started to build projects like Concerto, the RPI Web Technologies Group, was linked to the Concerto Project site.

The current Concerto-Signage.org uses a page-editing system implemented in Ruby on Rails, v3.1. Site administrators with login accounts can access advanced page editing features that allow them to create new site pages with short text slugs used in URLs and then build the pages interactively. Once pages are created, a unique column arrangement (1 to n columns, with each column having a custom width) is added to the page and individual content blocks are added to each column. This allows site administrators to potentially have custom layouts per page, but generally a two-column layout (main content on the left and a sidebar on the right) is used. CKEditor is used to edit block text and insert uploaded imagery.

As for the help pages, each page uses the same page layout. I designed a special page layout and indexing system that separates the various help pages into topic categories, which can be perused from the main help page. We implemented a simple search with IndexTank, which provides suggestions from a live search box that appears in the help page sidebar at all times. Each page - help page or main site page - has a comment box that allows visitors to provide feedback and suggestions on the helpfulness of the page and suggested additions.