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. Once you understand events, dayparts and priority, you can run anything from a single always-on screen to a network where breakfast menus hand over to lunch menus automatically and urgent announcements override everything.

Schedule events

An event is one scheduling rule. Creating one involves four decisions:

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, for example, might schedule the breakfast layout to a morning daypart and the lunch layout to a midday one, repeating every day, the switchover then happens by itself, every day, forever.

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, the display cycles through them in turn.
An event with a higher priority number displaces lower-priority events entirely for as long as it runs.

The practical pattern: keep your normal content at the default priority, and reserve higher priorities for takeovers, a flash promotion, an emergency notice, which you schedule over the top without touching the underlying events. 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. 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 at the scheduled moment is instant even on a slow connection. Because everything is cached locally, the schedule keeps running even if a display temporarily loses its connection.