How to Schedule a Menu Board: Time of Day, Weekdays and Take Over

A menu board is the simplest signage there is, and it is where scheduling earns its keep. Breakfast until 11, lunch until 14, the evening menu after that, and a promotion whenever nothing else is due. Here is how to build exactly that in Signital, and the handful of rules that make schedules behave.

Always Show or Scheduled

Every item you add to a plan ends with the same step, Set the schedule. Always show keeps the item in the rotation whenever the plan is active. Scheduled reveals three panels: Date range, Time of day and Weekdays. The item plays only when all three agree.

Time of day is set in 15-minute steps. A To time earlier than the From time is an overnight window, so 22:00 to 06:00 plays from ten in the evening until six the next morning. Weekdays are seven buttons, all on by default; switch off the days the item should not play.

The Worked Example

1. Add the promotion image with Always show. This is what plays whenever nothing else claims the screen.
2. Add the lunch menu with Scheduled. Leave Date range off, set Time of day to 11:00 to 14:00, and switch off Saturday and Sunday.
3. Switch on Take over. During its window the menu plays alone; everything else in the section waits.
4. Add the breakfast menu the same way, 07:00 to 11:00, and the evening menu, 17:00 to 22:00, both with Take over.
5. Press Add to plan for each, then Publish changes once. Until then the board keeps showing what it had.

Between 11:00 and 14:00 on a weekday the board shows only the lunch menu. From 14:00 to 17:00 the promotion runs. If the lunch menu is a playlist of three boards, one row on the plan carries all three and the schedule applies to the playlist as a whole.

Take Over Is the Key Switch

Without Take over, a scheduled item simply joins the rotation during its window, so the lunch menu would alternate with the promotion. That is the right behaviour for a campaign you want to mix in. For a menu, an opening-hours notice or a fire-drill message, Take over is what you want. When the window ends, the section returns to its normal rotation on its own.

Dates for Campaigns, Not for Menus

The Date range panel is for content with a start and an end: a two-week offer, a holiday greeting, a supplier’s launch. Set From and To and the item plays from the start of the first day to the end of the last, then drops out of the rotation without anyone remembering to remove it. Leave it off for anything that repeats weekly.

Durations, and Why Videos Ignore Them

Duration is how many seconds an item stays up each time its turn comes. Images and most widgets take the number you give them, prefilled from your Playback defaults or from what the widget knows about itself, so a News widget proposes stories times slide duration. Video, YouTube and Vimeo items play to the end regardless, and a section with a single video loops it.

Whose Clock Is It?

Schedules are read in your workspace time zone, unless the display has a location with its own. Give each site a location under Settings and the lunch menu shows at 11 local time in every city. Widgets that display a time, such as Date & Time and the calendars, take a time zone from their own settings.

Never Let the Board Go Blank

A section with no active item shows the default widget from Settings, an image or video you choose once for landscape and once for portrait. Set one before you build a tight schedule. Without it, the gap between the evening menu ending at 22:00 and breakfast at 07:00 is a black screen, or the Signital logo. A schedule that ends never breaks anything; the section falls back to its always-on items, and then to the default.

Change the Menu Without Touching the Board

A dish sells out: open the playlist, remove one row, Publish changes. Every board that plays the playlist updates within seconds. Prices change on the first of the month: open the image in Media and Replace the file, and the widget keeps its place on every plan. None of it needs a ladder or a USB stick.