Your First Layout | easyCMS Digital Signage

Your screen is connected and sitting on the logo, so the player is working and waiting for something to show. What it wants is a published layout: one screenful of design, with images, video and text where you want them.

Open the editor and name it

Sign in at app.myeasycms.com.
Go to Design > Layouts.
Click Add Layout. There is no form, the editor opens straight away.
Click Untitled at the top and give it a name.

Tip Name it first. Nameless layouts are miserable to find a month later.

Design > Layouts with the Add Layout button Design > Layouts. Add Layout opens the editor straight away.

What you are looking at

The editor is a canvas rather than a grid of fixed boxes, and four things do the work.

The canvas is the screen itself, drawn at the layout’s resolution. Everything is positioned, resized and rotated directly on it, and items may overlap.
The Toolbox is where content comes from, including a Library Search for files already in your account.
Widgets are the content modules: library media, clocks, weather, RSS, embedded web pages. Drag one onto the canvas and its settings appear in the Properties Panel.
Elements are the design pieces, Text, Dates and Times, Lines and Shapes, opened with the A button in the Toolbox. Use them for headings and captions rather than uploading a graphic for every line of text.

The layout editor: the canvas in the middle, the toolbox alongside it The canvas is the screen. You drag items onto it from the toolbox rather than filling in a grid of boxes.

Put a full-screen image or video on it

If the file is not in your library yet, upload it: Library > Media, Add Media, drag the file in, Done.

Then:

In the editor, open Library Search in the Toolbox.
Find your file and drag it onto the canvas.
Pull its handles out to the edges. The Snap to buttons, bottom right, help you land it cleanly.

Encode full-screen video at the layout’s resolution, so the player has no rescaling to do.

A shortcut. If a screen only ever needs that one file, skip the layout entirely:

Go to Library > Media and open the file’s row menu.
Choose Schedule.
Pick your screens and click Finish.

It plays full screen on its own.

When you need a Playlist

A Playlist is what you reach for when one area of the screen should cycle through several items. Add one with Add Playlists in the Toolbox, place it on the canvas, then open the Playlist Editor from the icon in its corner and add items to its Timeline.

You do not need one for a single image or video, or a design where everything is on screen at once. You do need one for a run of offers rotating in the middle while a logo and a clock stay put. A playlist built once can be reused on other layouts, see Playlists and the media library.

Set the resolution to match the screen

With nothing selected, the Properties Panel carries a Resolution drop down. Set it to match the screen: 1920 × 1080 landscape, 1080 × 1920 for a screen mounted vertically.

When the two disagree, the player scales the design to fit and you get black bars around it, or scales it to fill and content is cropped off the edges. That is arithmetic, not a fault: the fix is the resolution, not the design. Screen resolution and orientation covers the whole chain, screen, player output and layout all have to agree.

Publish it, or nothing will ever play

Watch out A layout must be published before it can play. An unpublished draft never reaches a screen: not through a schedule, not as a default layout, not ever. It is the most common reason a new screen still shows the logo after an afternoon of design work.

To publish:

Open the three-line menu at the top right of the editor.
Choose Publish.
Leave Publish Now ticked to go live at once. Or untick it and set a Publish Date for a change that should land overnight.

The Publish control, with the layout showing as a draft Until you Publish, the layout is a draft and will not play. This is the most common reason a first screen stays empty.

Editing later is safe. Checkout takes a draft copy while the published version carries on playing untouched, and your edits reach the screens only when you publish that draft.

Check the status before you schedule

The top of the editor shows the layout’s Status next to its total Duration. A green tick is what you want. An orange exclamation mark is normal on a layout carrying live content such as a web page, the CMS cannot verify what it does not hold.

An invalid layout is one with missing or faulty items in it. A player will not show it: it falls back to the display’s default layout, or to the splash screen if no default is set, which looks like nothing happening. Settle both here rather than hunting for a scheduling fault later, and if a layout stays invalid and you cannot see why, raise a support request with the layout name.

Next: Scheduling your first content, which puts this layout on screen at the right time.