Foyer - Digital Signage for WordPress

The first revenue Foyer ever generated was a 10 Polish zloty donation, roughly 2 euro / 2 USD and highly motivating! I bought two cookies to celebrate.

At the moment there is only a free version of Foyer, so no revenue apart from sporadic donations. I'm working on paid add-ons to make this a profitable business.

A very rough version was finished after some evenings of hacking. This version allowed you to add and manage displays, channels and slides, from within the WordPress back-end. Slides couldn't hold any content though :-) so it was useless in any practical sense.

But it showed me that my gut feel was right and it would be doable to build. Also I liked the workflow of what I built and imagined this would make it very easy for businesses running a WordPress website to also show their content on on-site displays.

During the year that followed I didn't touch the code once but I talked to several clients, mostly theaters, about what if they could manage their Digital Signage from their website CMS and they all seemed very interested.

After I sold the custom implementation of my free (and totally unfinished!) plugin to two large venues this was the big moment to finally make Foyer a reality.

Just one month later, March 2017, Foyer was launched on the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Since 1994 I've been professionally designing and building websites for clients. Mostly for theaters, music venues, museums, theme parks, festivals. Delivering from concept to actual website. Most of them including business logic like custom ticketing integrations and imports from other systems. Around 2012 I built my first WordPress website, theme and all, and since that project WordPress became my platform. I'm building custom plugins and themes, and of course using what great plugins are already available.

So far I've always been busy working for my clients, one of my clients even going back 20 years, and lived off word of mouth. While this is pretty convenient, I was drawn to building my own plugin and all the challenges, lessons and changes that would bring. Pretty exciting!

Seeing many of my event-centric clients struggle with their legacy Digital Signage systems, re-entering all those events and images that they had just added to their website.. I thought I could do a better job.

And here it is!
https://foyer.tv

Just select some images or posts or videos or events that are already living in your WordPress website, hook up a TV screen and your digital signage is up and running. You can even have it automatically display all your upcoming events or your recent posts, slide by slide.