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User Guide

This guide covers day-to-day use of the DisplayHive admin panel — the web interface where you manage layouts, designs, content, screens, and devices.

Everything here happens at /admin/ on your DisplayHive instance and pushes to screens live, no publish step or refresh needed.

How the pieces fit together

DisplayHive has a handful of core concepts, each covered in its own page — this is how they relate to each other:

graph LR
  Layout -->|groups positioned| Container
  Design -->|styles| Container
  ContentType -->|scoped to one| Layout
  ContentType -->|allowed in| Container
  Content -->|is an instance of| ContentType
  Content -->|assigned to| Screengroup
  Screengroup -->|contains| Screen
  Device -->|connects as| Screen

In short: a Layout groups positioned Containers on a canvas, and a Design (exactly one active instance-wide) styles them — colors, gradients, backgrounds, per-container CSS. A Content Type is scoped to one layout and declares which of its containers it's allowed into, and Content is a specific item of a content type, assigned to a Screen Group. Every Screen in that group shows it. A Device is the physical/browser player that connects to a screen. See Layouts, designs, content types & content and Screens, devices & groups for the details behind each box.

Where to start

If you're setting up DisplayHive for the first time, work through these pages roughly in order:

  1. Installation — get an instance running.
  2. Getting started — a hands-on walkthrough: load the demo content, register a device, watch a live update happen, and publish your own content type end to end.
  3. Users & login — log in for the first time, set a real password, and (if you're setting up others) understand rights & groups.
  4. Layouts, designs, content types & content — build a layout and put content on it.
  5. Screens, devices & groups — register a physical/browser display and point it at your content.

Once the basics are running, see Magic tags for reusable placeholder values, and Pretalx / Alerting for optional integrations (both experimental — see their pages for details). Import & export covers backups, and Settings covers instance-wide options. If something's unclear, check the FAQ first.