Scheduling Content | easyCMS Digital Signage

The schedule is the calendar of your signage network: it decides which published layout (or campaign) plays on which display, and when. Learn events, dayparts and priority and you can run anything: a single always-on screen, or a network where breakfast menus hand over to lunch menus by themselves.

Schedule events

An event is one scheduling rule. Open Schedule and click Add Event. A wizard walks you through it: pick the Event Type, choose what plays, tick the screens, then choose Always, a daypart or a custom time range. A further-options step at the end holds priority, display order and recurrence.

There is a shortcut worth knowing: you can also schedule straight from a layout’s or playlist’s own row menu, which skips the content-picking step.

The event types available are Layout, Campaign, Playlist, a full-screen Image or Video, Overlay, Interrupt, Command, Action and Synchronised. The four decisions behind all of them are:

What: a published layout, a campaign (an ordered list of layouts), or on newer players a playlist shown full screen.
Where: one or more displays, or a display group. Scheduling to groups is the habit to build early: add a screen to the “Shop floor” group and it inherits the group’s entire schedule instantly.
When: start and end date/time, plus optional repeats (daily, weekly, and so on) for recurring content.
How it competes: the event’s priority, covered below.

Events appear on a calendar view so you can see at a glance what any day looks like for a given display.

Always-on vs dayparted

For content that should simply run all the time, schedule the event as always, it plays continuously for the whole event period. For time-of-day control, use dayparts: named time slices such as “Morning 07:00–11:00” or “Opening hours”. Define a daypart once, then schedule events against it instead of typing times repeatedly. A café might put the breakfast layout on a morning daypart and the lunch layout on a midday one, repeating daily. The switchover then happens by itself, every day.

As a safety net, also give each display a default layout. It plays whenever no event is active, so a gap in the schedule shows your fallback branding instead of a blank screen.

Priority: what wins when events overlap

When two events target the same display at the same time, easyCMS needs a rule:

Events with equal priority share the screen and the display cycles through them. Display Order decides the sequence, sorted numerically from lowest to highest; leave it unset and they play in the order they were created.
An event with a higher priority number displaces lower-priority events for as long as it runs, but only events of the same type. That qualifier is the thing that makes priority make sense: a high-priority Layout event pushes other Layout events aside and leaves an Overlay alone. Most “priority did nothing” reports are two events of different types.

The practical pattern: keep normal content at the default priority. Reserve higher priorities for takeovers such as a flash promotion or an emergency notice, scheduled over the top without touching what is underneath. When the high-priority event ends, the regular schedule resumes automatically.

Campaigns

A campaign bundles several layouts into one ordered sequence that you schedule as a single unit. Build one under Design > Campaigns, click Add Campaign and choose the Layout List type. Instead of five separate events for five promotional layouts, build one campaign and schedule it once, the display plays the layouts in order and loops. Campaigns also make housekeeping easier: adding a sixth layout to the campaign updates every screen it is scheduled to.

Overlays and interrupts

Two special event types cover advanced cases:

Overlay events draw a layout on top of whatever is playing, ideal for a persistent logo, a breaking-news strap or a temporary banner that should not interrupt the main content.
Interrupt (share of voice) events guarantee a layout a slice of airtime, expressed as seconds per hour or a percentage, woven in between the normally scheduled content. Useful for advertising commitments or announcements that must appear regularly without owning the whole screen.

How changes reach the screens

Players check in with the CMS at a regular interval, compare schedules, and download anything new ahead of time. Content for a future event is fetched in advance where possible, so the switchover is quick even on a slow connection.

Good to know “Quick” rather than “instant”, and the reason matters: a layout already playing finishes its current item first. A screen looping five-minute videos can be several minutes behind you. A screen looping a five-minute video will not swap the moment the clock ticks over, which is the most common reason a schedule looks like it was missed when it was not. Because everything is cached locally, the schedule keeps running even if a display temporarily loses its connection.