Digital Signage
Turn a paired tablet or screen into an unattended board that shows approved notices, campaigns and live widgets, arranged in a layout you control.
Digital signage turns a screen in your lobby, hallway or entryway into an unattended board. It shows the notices your team already approved, the campaigns you are already running, and a small set of live widgets, and it keeps showing them without anyone touching it.
A screen in signage mode is not a donation terminal. It displays; it does not collect. If you want a screen that takes a gift, that is a kiosk: see Kiosk Campaigns.
When you’d use this
- A lobby or entryway screen that should show this week’s notices without anyone loading them each morning.
- A hallway board carrying an active campaign and its progress, with a QR code for anyone who wants to give.
- Several panels in one building that should all show the same thing, changed in one place.
- A screen that must not reload itself in the middle of Jumu’ah, a service or a fundraiser.
The four steps
Everything starts at Devices & Kiosk > Get a screen live, which is available to owners and admins. It walks four steps and marks each one done by looking at your actual data, not at a checkbox someone ticked:
| Step | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pair a screen | Generate a setup code, enter it on the device, and the screen appears in your list |
| Choose what it shows | Put the screen in signage mode and give it a layout |
| Put something on it | Place at least one approved notice or campaign onto the screen |
| Tell me when it breaks | Choose who gets an email when the screen stops checking in |
If you have never set up a screen before, follow them in order. Each one is reachable on its own afterwards.
Layouts and zones
A layout is a named arrangement of zones: the rectangles that divide the panel. A zone is positioned as a percentage of the screen, never in pixels, so the same layout holds its shape on a 24-inch portrait panel and a 65-inch landscape television.
Each zone declares what it pulls from:
| Zone source | Shows |
|---|---|
| Notices | Approved bulletin-board notices |
| Campaigns | Your active kiosk campaigns |
| Everything | Both, merged into one rotation |
| Widget | A live element rather than content: see below |
Widget zones cover three elements: a clock, an upcoming events list, and a donation thermometer.
Per zone you can also set how long each item holds before the next one, whether the zone shows its own title, whether artwork runs edge to edge, how many items a paged zone shows at once, whether the text crawls, and which transition carries one item to the next: a fade, a slide from the left, a slide upward, a wipe, or none at all.
Starting from a template
Muin ships a library of ready-made layouts alongside your own. Open Devices & Kiosk > Board Layouts and you will see both lists together; a Muin template offers Use this template, your own layouts offer Edit.
Choosing a template clones it into your tenant. You edit the copy: the shared template itself is never modified, so a change you make cannot reach anyone else.
Board Layouts is available to owners and admins.
Screen groups
A screen group is simply a device tag. Tag three lobby panels lobby, and they become a group you can act on at once: pick a layout, apply it to the group, and every screen carrying that tag changes together. The group view tells you how many screens carry the tag and whether they currently agree with each other: a group pointing at more than one layout is a group somebody changed halfway.
Getting content onto the screen
Content does not live on the screen. It lives in your bulletin board and your campaigns, and a placement binds it to a surface.
- A notice is approved on the bulletin board.
- You place it on the kiosk surface, aimed either at one specific screen or at a device tag.
- You give the placement a sort order and how long it should hold.
- Optionally you give it a daypart: a window of the day outside which it does not appear.
The screen asks the server for its playlist and shows what comes back. Because the merge happens on the server, two screens with the same layout and the same tag show the same thing, in the same order.
Dayparts are evaluated in the screen’s own wall-clock time: the time zone set on the screen’s configuration, falling back to your organization’s. Not the time zone of whoever authored the notice.
Keeping it quiet when the room is busy
A screen can restart itself to pick up an app update, and the one time that must never happen is while people are standing in front of it. Devices & Kiosk > Quiet hours is where you say when a screen may not restart itself: set the windows that matter to you, for example Friday midday, and the screen defers its own updates until the window closes.
Two other timing controls live elsewhere and do different jobs: the screen’s on-and-off schedule and its time zone are on the kiosk config, and a notice’s publish window and daypart are on the notice and its placement.
What the screen reports back
A screen records an impression when it actually shows something, and the duration it records is the time the item was really on screen, not the duration you configured. If a notice appears in two zones of the same layout at once, that counts once, not twice. The attract slideshow, the idle loop before anyone interacts, deliberately records nothing.
Those impressions roll up daily. Today they are readable through the API for a single notice; there is no impressions screen in the app yet, and there is no per-screen or per-layout playback report. If you need delivered-impression numbers for a sponsor, ask us: do not expect to find a report page.
Tips
- Give the screen a layout before you place content. A screen with no layout falls back to a simple arrangement, which is fine for one notice and cramped for six.
- Use a tag, not a screen id, when you have more than one panel. Placing content on a tag means a replacement screen inherits everything the moment you tag it.
- Portrait and landscape are different designs. A three-column layout that reads well landscape becomes three narrow strips in portrait. Clone the template that matches the orientation you actually hung.
- Deleting a layout does not blank a screen that was showing it on its own. That screen falls back to its simple arrangement. A screen running a rotation is different: rotation membership is not released, so deleting every board in a rotation leaves that screen with nothing to show. Muin warns you about exactly that case while you are editing.
Common Issues
| Symptom | Cause |
|---|---|
| The board is empty, with no error | Nothing is placed on this screen. A placement aimed at a different screen or a different tag is invisible here, silently. |
| A notice is missing at some times of day | It has a daypart, and you are outside the window. |
| A layout will not save | Every layout needs at least one zone, and the last zone in a layout cannot be removed. |
| Board Layouts is not in the menu | It is available to owners and admins. |
| Everything looks stretched | The layout’s orientation does not match how the panel is mounted. |
What signage does not do
- It does not play video. A zone shows still images: PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP. Upload anything else and the picker refuses it by name.
- It does not show prayer times or weather. Both were deliberately left out: an unattended screen that depends on an outside data feed fails in a way nobody is there to see. The three widgets are a clock, an upcoming-events list and a donation thermometer.
- It has no free-form web zone. A zone pulls from your notices, your campaigns or one of those three widgets, and nothing else.
- It does not collect payments. That is kiosk mode.
- It does not report playback per screen. Impressions are keyed to individual notices.
What you can do remotely
A screen that is still checking in can be acted on from the console: lock and unlock it, push its configuration, put the display to sleep or wake it, ask for a screenshot, collect its logs, or take it out of kiosk mode. Those live on the device in Fleet Dashboard and as a fleet-wide broadcast, and every one of them is recorded in Fleet Commands.
A command is applied by the device, not by the console, so the message you get back says it was sent and will apply at the device’s next check-in. Fleet Commands is where you watch it move from pending to delivered to executed or failed. A screen that has genuinely stopped checking in still needs someone in the room.
Related Features
- Bulletin Board, where the notices come from
- Board Layouts and Zones: designing the arrangement
- Kiosk Campaigns: a screen that takes a gift
- Devices: pairing, health, alerts and remote commands
Next step
Pair the tablet first in Device Management, then design what it shows in Board Layouts and Zones.
Need Help?
Contact support with the screen’s name and, if you have it, the layout you applied: those two identify the board faster than a photograph of it.