Visual customization of display panels

Omniscol display panels are designed to blend visually into your branding. Two levels of customization are available: (1) the settings in the interface (sufficient for most cases), (2) the complete replacement of the web page that renders the panel (for deployments with a strong visual identity).

Settings in the interface

In the Timetable module, the Display panel button opens the panel configuration screen. This screen exposes the following rendering options, editable without touching any code:

• Font size — small, medium or large. The display uses units relative to the window size (vmin), so readability stays consistent whatever the screen format (16:9, 4:3, portrait).
• Colors — background color, text color, colors of the even and odd rows of the lesson grid. All hexadecimal codes are accepted; you can copy the palette of your branding.
• Header banner — an ordered combination of: title, logo, today's date. You choose what appears in the header and in what order.
• Grid columns — selection and order among: classroom, classes, teachers, subject, times. Hiding a column (for example the teachers on a public panel at the entrance) or reordering it is immediate.
• Teacher name format — first name-last name, last name-first name, title + last name (Ms Durand), title + first name. The Mr and Ms titles automatically follow the interface language; what you set per panel is the format.
• Logo — the school logo uploaded in the school configuration can be displayed in the header banner.

These settings are saved in the panel configuration. Note: unlike lessons and messages, which refresh on their own, these visual options (colors, size, columns, banner, name format) are embedded in the page when it loads. After saving them, reload the tabs already open on the screens (F5 or a restart of the kiosk page) so they pick up the new rendering.

Complete template replacement (MIT license)

The template that renders the display page is explicitly under the MIT license and can be copied then adapted to customize a school's panel.

This opens up several scenarios for schools that want to go beyond the settings:

• Complete visual redesign — rewrite the template's HTML/CSS to fit a strong branding (proprietary font, specific animations, non-standard layout).
• Integration into an existing signage system — embed the content of an Omniscol panel in a global display page that multiplexes lessons, weather, school news, videos…
• Specific business views — create a display, for example, for supervisors (who has to do what), for a technical department (room occupancy with equipment needs), and so on.

To do this, two complementary approaches:

1. Forking the template — if you self-host Omniscol, duplicate panel.dot, modify it, and deploy your version. The MIT license explicitly allows modifications, redistributions and commercial uses.
2. The panel's JSON API — if you want to keep Omniscol as the data source but render the display on a third-party side, the panel URL also exposes a JSON variant (GET /panels/:accesshash/lessons). It returns the list of lessons filtered according to the panel configuration, ready to be consumed by a third-party signage system (Yodeck, Xibo, ScreenCloud, an in-house dashboard). This URL opens with the panel's access key, without any additional token. For broader system-to-system integrations, the Omniscol REST API is described in Omniscol API.

Practical recommendations

A few points that come up often in deployments:

• Contrast — a dark background + light text is easier on the eyes for a screen running 12 hours a day than a white background.
• "Large" font size as soon as the screen is read from more than 2 m away (typical of an entrance hall). Keep "Medium" for classroom door screens, viewed from closer up.
• Logo in the header banner — always useful for quick identification when several panels coexist on a large campus.
• Date in the header banner — useful in a lobby (visitors check the date), less useful outside a classroom (the context is obvious).
• Hiding the teachers column on public panels if your school has internal rules about displaying names.