What is a scene, and when does a display show it?
You changed something, and the wall still shows the old content.
3 minute readContentUpdated: 10/25/2026
Before you start
- For
- Anyone who designs scenes and wants to know why a change has not reached the wall yet.
- Where in the portal
- Scenes
A scene is designed content for the displays, made of widgets. While you work on it, it is a draft and runs on no display. Only publishing creates the version that goes out to the displays.
Widgets on a stage
A scene is made up of individual building blocks, the widgets: a text box, an image or a video from the media library, a shape, a graphic. Widgets of installed apps are added to these, such as a clock, the weather, or a menu board. All of them sit on a stage with a fixed format, that is, the aspect ratio the scene is built for.
You can organize the stage in two ways. A layout template specifies named areas, the slots. A widget snaps into place there and takes its dimensions and position from the slot. A Free scene has no slots: every widget sits where you drop it.
Draft, version, published
Three terms shape the whole editor.
Every scene has a current Draft. Everything you build on the stage changes this draft, and Save stores it. A draft is a working state, nothing more.
Publish freezes the draft into a scene version. It carries a number (v1, v2, and so on), is immutable, and is distributed to the assigned displays. After that, you keep working on the draft, and nothing changes on the displays until you publish again. If nothing has changed in content, the portal reports No content change — no new version was created, and no version is created.
The status says how far along a scene is: Draft, Published, or Archived. Two things stop publishing: open blocking integrity issues, such as an uninstalled app or a deleted media item, and a missing permission to publish. Revert to this version replaces only the draft with an earlier state. The published versions themselves remain untouched.
What follows
- A draft runs on no display. If a wall shows an old version, it almost always means that nothing was published after the last change.
- You can keep designing at any time, even in the middle of operation. The work becomes visible only with the next publish.
- If a scene uses an app that the booked package does not cover, it carries the Blocked badge and does not play — not even when it is published.
- An earlier version is never lost. Reverting brings it back into the draft. It reaches the display only with the next publish.
Related
Found what you needed? Then carry on in the portal — or set up an organization first.
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