Sometimes a plugin isn't relevant, such as in the off-season for your favorite sports team, or because it's not the right day of the week. Other times, you may want to keep content stale on purpose.
If this is strictly a day of the week or hour of the day schedule, then you could use our playlist scheduler to set things up. But if you want to control it from the plugin level, there are two special variables available in markup.
TRMNL_SKIP_SCREEN_GENERATION
Use Case: When no news is good news.
{% if condition %}
<script>
window.TRMNL_SKIP_SCREEN_GENERATION = true;
</script>
{% endif %}Screen generation is based on your plugin's set refresh rate. When it is time to refresh your plugin's content, our worker servers will look/refresh your data source and then look at your markup. If the TRMNL_SKIP_SCREEN_GENERATION variable is set to true, the worker will skip generating a new screen.
This setting does not affect whether a plugin is shown on a playlist, unless you enable the playlist feature "Smart Playlist":
TRMNL_SKIP_DISPLAY
{% if condition %}
<script>
window.TRMNL_SKIP_DISPLAY = true;
</script>
{% endif %}If set to true, TRMNL_SKIP_DISPLAY will cause the plugin to be skipped on your playlist when it's requested by your device.
💡Tip: You can also return TRMNL_SKIP_DISPLAY = true as a top level property of your polling payload response, and it will have the same effect as setting window.TRMNL_SKIP_DISPLAY = true in markup.
{
"TRMNL_SKIP_DISPLAY": true,
"other_data": "..."
}
TRMNL_SKIP_DISPLAY should not be used in published recipes, as user's have no indication that the plugin's markup caused it to be skipped in their playlist and can lead to confusion. Use in private plugins is the most appropriate.