Concerto 3.0.0 - rc1
18 years ago today, a half dozen of us hauled a screen into the lobby of RPI’s Lally School of Management and got the first version of Concerto up and running. A few more screens quickly followed around campus, and somehow we never stopped.
(18 years! God we’re getting old.)
I’m excited to announce the first release candidate for Concerto 3: 3.0.0.rc1.
This is a ground-up rewrite — Rails 8, Vue 3, and all the core features you know from Concerto 1 and 2. Screens, feeds, content, subscriptions, submissions, moderation, it’s all here. If you’ve run Concerto before, you should feel right at home.
Beyond the basics, there are a few new things I’m particularly excited about. We finally have a proper solution to the “how do I keep a clock in the corner” problem with pinned content: any piece of content can now be locked to a field on a screen. There’s finally a WYSIWYG template editor for designing screen positions visually, no code required. We’ve added OIDC support for organizations that have moved on to modern SSO. And there’s a new concept called Remote Feeds for pulling in dynamic content from external sources that I think is going to be really powerful (more on that in an upcoming post).
If you want to try it out, the release is available as a Docker image to install. If you’d rather just click around, there’s a demo environment at demo.concerto-signage.org with a live screen. You can create your own account, or sign in as a feed moderator or screen manager using these credentials.
Those of you who’ve been around for a while will notice this release looks and feels more like Concerto 1 than Concerto 2. In the interest of getting something shipped, we focused on the fundamentals needed to run a community digital signage system. We’ll get to all the bells and whistles, and I’ve got a few clever ideas to share, but it’s been way too long since we’ve shipped a release.
For now this is a fresh start, not an upgrade from Concerto 2. There’s no migration path at this time. As a release candidate, it’s close to production-ready and there are no major blockers we’re tracking, but there’s still a bit of polish left. We’d love for you to kick the tires and let us know what you find.
Our Github Issue Tracker is open for bugs and feature requests, and there’s a discussion thread if that’s more your jam.
Thank you to everyone who’s stuck with this project over the years. Looking forward to the next 18.