Digital Signage Widgets

Your playlist can schedule apps, not just media

Images and videos cover most use cases. When you need live data, interactivity, or external integrations, you need something that runs logic. That’s what widgets are: self-contained HTML5 applications that live in your playlist like any other media item.

Widgets are based on the W3C Packaged Web Apps standard. The W3C deprecated it in 2018 because it was created for smartphones, but native mobile apps had already won that battle.

In digital signage, the situation is different: We have fragmented hardware and mixed operating systems. The format fits the problem space perfectly, and the spec is open and will not disappear.

We document everything we do, build on open standards, and publish our tools as open source. Your widgets are not tied to our platform. That’s a deliberate choice, not an accident.

Any digital signage player that supports the WGT format can run it. This includes garlic-player, IAdea devices, and others.

What can you actually do with widgets?

Widgets can do anything a web page can do with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. But they run offline-capable on the device. They accept also parameters. A weather widget takes a location, an RSS ticker takes a feed URL, a room sign takes a calendar ID, etc

Examples

Live data displays — weather forecasts, stock tickers, public transport departures, air quality, sports scores. The widget fetches data from an API and renders it directly on screen.

Calendar and room scheduling — connect to Google Calendar or Exchange and show room availability, meeting schedules, or door signs that update automatically.

Queue management — patient call systems, service counter displays, waiting room information. The widget handles the logic; the CMS handles the scheduling.

Social media and RSS feeds — pull in content from external feeds without embedding an external URL that breaks when the connection drops.

Animated templates — instead of generating a new video every time your offer changes, build a widget once with placeholders. Content editors fill in text and images; the widget handles the animation.

Interactive kiosk applications — self check-in, product information, interactive directories. Touch-capable, fully customizable, deployable across mixed hardware environments.

Why not just embed a URL?

Linking to an external website from a signage player is a common shortcut. It works until the internet fails. When the connection drops, you get a blank screen or an error page.

Widgets solve this cleanly. The entire application, including its assets, is downloaded to the player. It runs locally. A network interruption doesn’t kill the display. Data is fetched on a schedule and can be cached.

Real Life Example

A SMIL player can open a webpage via a trigger, but have no way to detect user interaction inside it. The only option is a hard timeout that breaks every interactive use case.

A widget controls its own lifecycle. It signals completion, responds to touch events, and hands control back to the playlist intentionally.

The WebWrap in our Widget Library does exactly this job.

Who builds widgets?

Anyone who knows HTML and JavaScript. No native development, no vendor API agreements, no porting when you swap hardware.

We provide IDE plugins for VS Code and JetBrains to get you started.

We maintain a growing collection of ready-to-use widgets. Drop them into your playlist, configure the parameters, done.

Built something useful? We accept contributions.