Showtile – Digital Signage & TV Menu Board

Description

Showtile turns any TV with a web browser into a digital menu board, welcome screen or announcement screen, run from your own WordPress. You pair a TV by scanning the QR code it shows with your phone — nothing to type on a TV remote — you schedule each slide by day, time of day and date, and the TV keeps playing offline when the internet drops.

How Showtile is different

• Pair a TV with a QR code. Open your site’s TV address on the TV; it shows a short code and a QR code. Scan it with your phone, name the TV, pick what it shows — done. No long address with a password in it to type on a remote.
• Menu boards with live WooCommerce prices. Point a menu board at a product category: names, prices, sale prices and sold-out items come from your shop, and when you change a price in the shop the TV follows by itself within a minute. No shop? Type the menu instead.
• A schedule on every slide. Any slide can show only on chosen days, between chosen times — even across midnight — and between two dates, in your site’s time zone. Breakfast menu until 11:00, lunch after, the Christmas opening hours only in December.
• Keeps playing when the internet drops. Each TV keeps its own copy of the photos and the last slides it was given, keeps the screen awake, and recovers on its own if something freezes.
• Every TV from your phone. See which TVs are online and when each was last heard from, change what a TV shows, refresh a TV from anywhere, or forget it.
• Nothing leaves your site. No account, no API key, no subscription, no outside service. Unlimited TVs.

Set up a TV in about a minute

1. On the TV (or any screen with a web browser), open your site’s address followed by /?showtile.
2. Scan the code the TV shows with your phone’s camera and log in to your site if asked.
3. Name the TV, choose a starter — Welcome screen, Waiting room, Café menu, Announcements or Photo loop — and tap “Connect this TV”. The TV starts playing.

No camera on your phone? Open TV Screens in your site’s admin, tap “Add a TV” and type the code instead.

What a TV can show

• Photos from your media library, filling the screen or shown whole.
• Videos from your media library, muted, looping or played to the end.
• Messages — a headline and some text on a colour or a photo, sized to fit. The editor warns when the text colour is hard to read from across a room and offers the nearest colour that is easy to read.
• A page or post from your site, full screen, with your theme’s colours and block styles, scaled to fit.
• Menu boards, from your shop or typed by hand, in one, two or three columns or set automatically. A long menu turns into pages on its own — a menu board never scrolls.
• A clock, with the date, in 12-hour or 24-hour time, always in your site’s time zone.
• A slide you design in the block editor — the same WordPress editor you write pages with, on a black TV-shaped canvas, starting from ready-made layouts: today’s special, opening hours, a welcome, a price list. Publish it and add it to any TV.
• A split screen — side by side, or one above the other on a portrait screen: your menu board next to a video, a photo next to a QR code, a message next to the clock. Half and half, or one part bigger.
• A QR code for any web address — your menu, your ordering page, your Wi-Fi page or your review page — big on a white card, with a title and a caption, so customers open it with their phone camera from across the counter.

A TV ticker: a news bar along the bottom of the screen

Add one line of text — “Happy hour from 5 to 7”, “Free Wi-Fi: ask at the counter” — and it scrolls along the bottom or the top of every TV showing that list, running on while the slides change. The slides make room for it, so it never covers a price.

Show now: an urgent message on every TV

Type a message on your phone, choose how long it shows, and tap “Show now on every TV” — “Closing early today”, “Lunch is served”. Every TV switches to it within a minute and goes back to its slides at the end time, or when you tap Stop.

Each slide shows for 5, 10, 15 or 30 seconds, or any time from 3 seconds to an hour, and the new slide fades in over the old one — the screen never flashes white or goes blank between slides.

TV menu boards for restaurants, cafés and bars

A digital menu board for a restaurant, a café menu board above the counter, a food menu board in a bar — or a restaurant TV menu in the window. With WooCommerce, a menu board lists a product category with live prices, sale prices and sold-out items greyed out or hidden; without it, type your sections, items, prices and notes on your phone. The Café menu starter gives you one to change.

Waiting room TV and lobby display

The Waiting room starter shows a welcome, the time and date, and your notes and photos; the Welcome screen starter greets visitors in a lobby with your site’s name and your own photos.

Church and school announcements

The Announcements starter is a set of message slides you rewrite on your phone; schedule each one for the days it applies — the Sunday service times on Sundays, the school trip notice until the trip.

A TV slideshow that keeps playing offline

On a site served over https, each TV keeps its own copy of the photos it shows and the last slides it was given, so the TV slideshow goes on through a Wi-Fi drop and says so quietly at the bottom of the screen. Every minute it checks in with your site, and picks up your changes then.

Kiosk mode and full screen

The TV page is a complete page of its own — none of your theme’s menus, header or footer — made for a TV browser’s full-screen or kiosk mode. One press of OK on the remote, a key or a click switches it to full screen. It keeps the screen awake while it plays and starts fresh once a night, at 04:00 in your site’s time zone.

Which TVs and devices

Anything with an up-to-date web browser: smart TVs, TV sticks and boxes, a small computer running Chromium in full screen, tablets and laptops. Landscape and portrait screens both work, and a TV that cannot turn its picture can have it turned by 90 degrees, with a margin for TVs that cut off the edges. Showtile is tested in Chromium and in Safari’s engine at 1080p, 4K and portrait TV sizes, on a slowed-down TV-stick-class browser, and on phones and tablets.

The digital signage player

The player is your site’s address followed by /?showtile=play; a TV goes there by itself once it is paired. It reads its slides from your site with a key only that TV holds, and that key is stored on your site only in scrambled (hashed) form.

Privacy

This plugin does not connect to any external service.

It sends nothing anywhere and loads nothing from anywhere else: no fonts, no scripts from other sites, no analytics. TVs talk only to your own site. A TV’s check-in stores when it was last heard from, its screen size, the slide it was on, its player version and the kind of device it is (a TV stick, a tablet…) — never an address.

The Your TVs screen has one ordinary link, “Get early access”, to a page about a possible paid service. Nothing is sent when the screen loads; the page opens in your browser only if you click, and your e-mail address reaches us only if you type it there.

Third-party code

The QR code is drawn by the QR Code generator library by Project Nayuki (MIT License), included as readable source with its licence in public/vendor/.