Inside the Redesigned Signital Portal: What Changed and Why

14 Sept 2026

Most questions we get in support come down to one thing: where should this content go? Signital keeps the answer small. There are three containers, each solves a different problem, and once you see the pattern you stop thinking about it. First, the path every item takes. You upload media or configure a widget. You add it to a scheduled plan, which says what plays, in what order and when. The plan belongs to a display or a channel. You press Publish changes. The player fetches the published plan and plays it. The Display’s Own Plan Every display has a plan of its own, so you never need to create anything else to get a single screen going. Add a display, connect it, press Add to plan, publish. A reception screen that shows the visitor welcome and the weather, and nothing else anywhere, belongs here. Use it when one display shows something only it shows. The moment a second screen should show the same thing, stop and read on, because copying items between displays is how menus drift apart. A Channel for Everything Shared A channel is a plan that many displays can follow at once. Put the lunch menu on a channel, point ten displays at it, and they play the same thing. Edit the channel once and press Publish changes, and all ten update within seconds. A display follows exactly one channel at a time, and the channel page tells you how many do: Active on 10 displays, 9 online. Channels are orientation-specific, so a landscape channel is only offered to landscape displays. They also carry the transition between items, from Crossfade to Slide, and the layout when you split the screen. When you add a display you can pick its channel in the same dialog, so a new store opens on the right content before anyone has touched it. A Playlist for Sequences You Reuse A playlist is an ordered run of content you build once and drop into any plan as a single item. Ten seasonal promotions become one row on the channel, and updating the playlist updates every channel and display that plays it. On the plan it shows as one row with a Playlist badge, its items nested underneath and a duration summed from them. Reach for a playlist when the same sequence belongs in several channels, or when a channel is getting long and you want to manage a campaign as one thing. A playlist cannot contain another playlist, and it is authored for one orientation. The Mixed Case: Same Everywhere, Except Here Twelve branches share a brand channel, but one branch runs a local event this week. Do not fork the channel. Leave eleven on the channel and take the twelfth off it with Remove channel on its display page; its own plan resumes. Drop the shared content in as a playlist, add the local item, publish. Next week, Connect to channel again and it is back in line. Alternatively, keep the branch on the channel and put the shared content in a playlist that also carries the local item on a schedule. Which you choose depends on whether the exception is a week or a way of life. Schedules Stack An item inside a playlist can have a schedule, and the playlist row on the plan has one too. The item plays only when both agree. A promotion set to 08:00 to 12:00 inside a playlist the plan shows from 10:00 to 18:00 plays from 10:00 to 12:00. If the two windows never overlap, the item never plays, and nothing warns you, so check the plan preview. What Publish Changes Covers On a display page: the display’s own plan, and the shared channel it follows if any. Every display following that channel is affected. On a channel page: the channel’s plan and layout, for every display following it. On a playlist page: the playlist’s items, for every channel and display that plays it. Before you publish a shared channel or a playlist, glance at its Active on line. That number is how many screens are about to change. A Quick Rule of Thumb One display, unique content: the display’s own plan. Several displays, same content: a channel. Same content everywhere, one display needs a variation: a channel for the rest, that display on its own plan. A sequence you want inside several channels: a playlist.

11 Sept 2026

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 Add the promotion image with Always show. This is what plays whenever nothing else claims the screen. 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. Switch on Take over. During its window the menu plays alone; everything else in the section waits. 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. 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.

9 Sept 2026

A screen that shows one thing at a time is easy to read and easy to run. Sometimes, though, you need the calendar beside the weather, or a scrolling ticker under the video that never goes away. Split screen is how Signital does that, and it follows one rule that keeps it sane: every section has a plan of its own. Pick a Layout First Press Split screen on the preview card of a channel, or of a display that plays its own plan. The Choose channel layout dialog shows the stock layouts for that orientation with the current one outlined. Fullscreen is the default. Then come Main with a footer, header, left bar or right bar; Main with a larger lower or upper pane; two equal halves, vertical or horizontal; four three-section combinations of a bar and a strip; three equal strips either way; and a 4-way split. Sixteen in total. Choosing a different layout empties the plan, and the dialog warns All content will be removed before it does. So pick the layout first, then add content. The layout change is itself a draft until you press Publish changes, so a display keeps playing the old arrangement while you fill the new one. Every Section Has Its Own Plan With more than one section, the Scheduled plan card gains a section picker in its header listing each section by name with its size in pixels. Pick Footer, press Add to plan, and the item lands in the footer only. Switch to Main and fill that. Each section runs its own rotation and its own schedule, so a footer ticker stays up all day while the main area changes every ten seconds. This is why a split layout does not need special content. The ticker is a Ticker widget with Always show. The main area is the same playlist you would run full screen. The weather in the sidebar is a Weather widget with a long duration. Nothing is glued together; you can change any section without touching the others. The Two Rules The Display status widget, the board of your fleet’s health, is only offered in a section that fills the whole display. Adding a video to a second section shows a Video warning, because two videos decoding at once can stutter on some devices. You can continue, but a menu board with one video and a ticker is a safer design than two videos side by side. Design Each Widget at Its Real Size A widget built for a full screen looks cramped in a footer 200 pixels tall. On the widget page, the preview can be set to a layout and a section, so you see the ticker at the height it will really have and choose the text size accordingly. Brand styles under Settings give every new widget the same font and palette, which is what makes a clock, a ticker and a calendar look like one design instead of three. Portrait Works the Same Way Layouts are orientation-specific. A portrait channel is offered the stock layouts that support portrait and the preview shows them upright, so a lobby totem gets a header, a main area and a footer without any rotation tricks. When to Draw Your Own On the Business plan, Settings holds a Layout Editor. Name the layout, choose a screen size from 21:9 ultrawide to 3:4 portrait or a custom width and height, press Add section for each area and drag it into place. Layouts you save appear under Custom layouts in the Split screen dialog once you have made at least one. Editing a layout that channels already use changes every one of them, and the Save layout dialog lists them by name before it does. Deleting a layout that is in use is blocked until no channel or display uses it. If a workspace later moves back to Standard, channels keep playing with the custom layouts they have; what stops is editing them and making new ones. A Good Default If in doubt, start with Main + Footer. Put the content in Main, a Ticker in the Footer with a line of text or headlines from an RSS feed, and publish. It is the layout most menu boards, receptions and staff rooms end up on, and it upgrades to something more ambitious without anyone noticing the change.