This is Kori’s review of a WordPress plugin for adding a Restaurant Menu to your website. If you’re a cafe or restaurant wanting to list out your items – check out this free plugin.
Full Video Transcript
Hey y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton and today you’re gonna look at a new plugin provided by our friends over at MotoPress. I have done a few before on their page-builder plugin that’s extraordinary. This is a new free option that they’re providing for the WordPress world. A free restaurant menu plugin. So, what
I’ve done is gone ahead and added it to a staging environment. I’ve just downloaded it. Downloaded it just like this. Of course, it’s gonna be a zipped file. Go to your plugins and click “Add New” and that’s where it has an option for you to upload a plugin, right?
Click here and click “Upload Plugin”. Come over here “Browse”, find that zipped file and then, you just drop it in there and it’s install it. Of course, you want to activate it, right? Once it’s active you will then have access, right here. “Restaurant Menu”. You’ll then have access to this are over here. Now, just full disclosure, I haven’t spent time researching this.
What I just shared with you that I’ve done is all that I have done. They do have some pretty great documentation. I just briefly looked through to get an idea of how to do this tutorial for you. But, I really wanted to
give you a very honest review of my experience and kind of let y’all see the experience of setting this menu plugin up for the very first time. What does that look like? Plug it into an existed website.
So, let’s do it. Let’s go ahead and come over here to “Menu”and I’m gonna add a “Category”. We’re just gonna go ahead and call it “Breakfast”.
And, I guess we can go ahead and add in a thumbnail image. That’d be pretty cool.
Add new menu category there. And, it’s already added. I’m gonna add in
“Starters” for appetizers, right? So, let’s “Add Menu” category there and
you can see that it’s added over here. So, let’s add the new menu item.
Click “Add New” and let’s say this is one of my favorites. We’ll say “Fried Pickles”.
And all the details here.
Seems pretty easy. Let’s add it to “Starters”. Sounds pretty simple. Wow, you can even add ingredients over here. You can get pretty fancy with everything. You can put in a price. Let’s do that and say “5.99”. Look at this, you guys, it even has nutritional facts you can add in there. That’s pretty great.
Goodness. “Portion Size”, we can say this will be for four people and it’s probably crazy full of carbs. Let’s say 300 carbs. Who knows! I have no idea. I’d like to be healthier than that.
For now, that’s all I’m gonna do. I’m gonna click “Publish”. I wonder if we can throw in a picture in there, as well. I bet we could.
I bet we would use the feature. Look at this, you could even have a full image gallery. That’s pretty cool. You can put in all sorts of stuff there.
Alright, so, we can just add menu items. Let’s add another one just to be
sure to have two things going on in here. See how simple it is so far?
Let’s add something to our “Breakfast”and we’ll say “Chicken and Waffles”. Can you tell I’m southern, or what? Here you go. Yummy.
Let’s go ahead and add it to our breakfast and we’re gonna go ahead and put in the price, as well. We’ll say “$7.99”. We’ll say that it’s amazing. Not even add carbs. We don’t want to think about that right now. So, let’s go ahead and publish.
Ok, so what I’ve done right now, very quickly in just a three minute time. I’ve already installed it. Added two menu items. Added details. Of course, if you already had this somewhere (maybe in a Word document) you could just be copying and pasting all this information in these spots. Then, if we want to add it to an actual page, let’s see what that looks like.
I’m gonna go to pages and say “Add New”. We’re gonna create a new page
called “Menu. Now, we have this little icon right here. “Insert Restaurant Menu Short Code”. I’m gonna click there and see what the
options are. “Show Categories”, “Show Menu Items”.
That’s kind of cool. So, I’m just gonna say “Show Menu Items” and just for the sake of figuring out what all this is, let’s go ahead and say a “List”.
We’re gonna go ahead and check both categories that we’re gonna be adding
in there. Do we want one column or four? My goodness, they give you so many cool options. Show attributes right away, show the featured image. I would assume that’s what we would want to do here.
Show excerpt, show price, show tag, show ingredients. Link the item. That’s pretty cool.
Let’s just say insert short code. So, it’s gonna drop in this cool code,
right here. That is the thing that supposed to render the menu to appear on our website. So, behind the scenes back here in this view you will always have the shortcode present. In order to see the changes, you’d have to click “Preview Changes”.
Open it up on the front side of our website. See what it looks like.
Check this out, you guys. Here’s our “Breakfast” category. “Chicken and Waffles” and it is linked. Here’s our “Starter” category. “Fried Pickles” and again it’s linked. If I click on “Fried Pickles” it will take me to an individual page that would have details listed out here that you can see.
That’s pretty groovy cool. That’s not bad at all. Let’s see what else we can do with it. Back here to the menu item. Let’s go to menu items here and see if we can go ahead and get rid of the comments; because, of course we wouldn’t want any comments to happen on our menu items. So,
we’d update that. Come here to “Click Edit”, as well and we would take off the comments capability; because, we certainly don’t want that.
Let’s see if we can add a picture just really quickly to see what that would look like inside of our featured image.
“Chicken and Waffles”. I bet the cat would like to eat chicken and waffles. Let’s see “Update” and let’s go back here to our menu page.
I’m gonna click “Refresh”. There’s a picture right next to it.
Very nice. The picture is linked, as well. So, all of this links to our
“Chicken and Waffles” page.
Let’s click on it. “Chicken and Waffles” appears in this particular menu back there as my featured image and you could have a full detail here and a full price. If you didn’t want them linked and you just wanted everything listed out here with the full description, then that would
be the options as you edited the shortcode. So, going back here to
“All Pages”. Let’s go back here for a minute to our menu and what we do is just take out the short code we that we have in there for now.
Completely remove that and then rearrange our options, right? So, we would say “Show Categories” instead. Let’s do it in a grid and let’s choose both and do we want to show the categories description? The icon? The featured image? Show the name. How many columns do you want them in? “Insert”.
So, you have all sorts of different ways you can set up the structure of how your menu would appear on this page. I’m gonna click “Refresh” and we’ll see it in maybe two columns.
Check that out, you guys. Here’s our “Breakfast” and our “Starters”.
Click “Breakfast” then it will go in and show us our full breakfast menu.
Of course, if we didn’t want it linked anywhere, that would just be the
option we would choose “Not Linked”. You guys, that isn’t really bad for a free option for setting up a menu on your website. If you’re running a
little restaurant or cafe, this could be a great option for you.
I hope that this helps you. If you want take a look at some of the other options that MotoPress offers. Be sure to go over to their website, getmotopress.com
I’ll put that link for you in the description box below. They have a really outstanding page builder, as well, that I’ve shared with you guys before.
So, you can check that out and they’ve got a very simple slider that’s
pretty cool, as well.
Hope you’re having a great day. I will catch you next WordPress Wednesday
where I am going to talk to you about 8 things to not be doing on your website
Here’s the plugin link https://www.getmotopress.com/plugins/restaurant-menu-plugin/
Here’s their documentation
https://www.getmotopress.com/files/motopress-restaurantmenu-plugin-documentation.pdf
