Folders for restaurant menus
A restaurant menu changes all year: lunch and dinner, summer and winter, new dishes and dishes you took off. The Menu Items list keeps every one of them.
Plathix PRO adds private folders to the Menus and Menu Items lists of Five Star Restaurant Menu. Group dishes by season, service or status and open one folder at a time. Sections, prices and the menu on your site stay as they are.
Every dish you ever served
Menu Items shows all dishes in one list: this season and last season, lunch and dinner copies, specials, dishes you took off but may bring back.
Sections are the wrong place to keep that order. Five Star Restaurant Menu builds the menu on your site from its sections, so sections should stay for your guests.
A menu is never finished
Restaurant owners and the people who build their sites say the same thing: the menu keeps changing, and the old dishes stay in the list.
The menu is big: 400 dishes and more, with many categories and different sizes.
The menu changes every week, sometimes four times a week. Guests still ask for dishes that left months ago.
Lunch and dinner sell some of the same dishes at different prices, so each of those dishes gets copied into a second item.
Summer and winter need sections with the same names, so they end up called food_v1 and food_v2.
Folders sort the dishes for your team by season, service or status. Sections still build the menu your guests see.
Folders that match how your kitchen works
By season
Summer and winter dishes in their own folders. When the season comes back, the dishes are waiting.
Lunch and dinner
Same dish, two prices, two menu items? Keep each copy in the folder of its service, so you change the right one.
Ideas to try
New dishes the chef is still testing stay as drafts in one folder until they are ready.
Off the menu
When a dish leaves the menu, unpublish it as usual and move it to one folder. Next year you know where it is.
Two lists, two folder trees
Menu Items
Every dish and drink. The panel sits beside the list, with its Price and Sections columns.
Menus
Each menu you place on a page: lunch, dinner, take-away, one per restaurant. Menus get their own tree, apart from the dishes.
A Folder column
Every row shows its folder; click it to open that folder.
Search inside a folder
Search, status tabs and date filters work inside the open folder.
Your menu page never sees your folders
| What you do | What changes | What stays as it is |
|---|---|---|
| Put a dish in a folder | Its Plathix folder | The dish, its price and its sections |
| Rename or move a folder | The folder tree in wp-admin | The menu on your site and its sections |
| Reorder dishes on Reorder Items | Their order on the menu | Every folder and what is in it |
| Trash a dish, then restore it | Its Trash state | Its folder: it comes back to the same place |
| Turn Plathix PRO off | The list looks like plain WordPress | Your folders wait in the database and come back |
Folders have no URLs and never appear on the site.
How we test Five Star Restaurant Menu
We run each check on a live site with Plathix PRO and the current Five Star Restaurant Menu version, on the real Menu Items screen.
Status Planned
Results go to Plathix Lab. Each row turns into a link once it has run.
| Check | What we verify | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Enable menu items | Turn on Menu Items in Enabled Sections; the panel appears on the list. | Planned |
| Menus tree | Turn on Menus too; it gets its own tree. | Planned |
| Sections filter | Folder filter together with the Sections drop-down. | Planned |
| Menu page unchanged | The menu on a page looks the same after filing dishes in folders. | Planned |
| Trash and restore | A trashed dish comes back to its folder. | Planned |
Restaurant menu folders FAQ
Do folders change the menu on my site?
Can I keep summer and winter dishes apart?
Do Menus and Menu Items share one tree?
Do orders get folders?
Is this in Plathix Free?
Related pages
Change the menu every season. Find every dish in seconds.
Dishes and menus in folders you choose. The menu on your site stays as it is.