Catering and seasonal menus

Two extra pages: packages you quote for, and dishes that come and go.

Some of what a restaurant sells doesn't belong on the menu. A hog roast for forty isn't a dish someone orders at a table, and a pumpkin ravioli that runs for six weeks in autumn shouldn't have to be typed in every September and deleted every November.

So there are two more pages you can use, and they work the same way as About Us and the Gallery: they don't exist until you put something on them.

Neither page appears until you publish something

A restaurant that doesn't cater never shows the word "Catering" anywhere. No link in the menu bar, nothing in the footer, nothing for a search engine to find. The same for Seasonal.

You'll see both links while you're signed in, so you can reach a page and fill it in. Your diners won't see either one until something on it is published.

The catering page

Adding a catering package uses the same form as adding a dish — name, price, photo, description, and the dietary and allergen labels. What's different is the page it lands on.

There are no sections. Catering is one list, and each package sits in the middle of the page across most of its width, with the whole description showing. That's deliberate: a package needs a paragraph about what's included, how many it feeds, how far ahead you need notice and what you bring with you. On the menu a description is trimmed to a line or two, because a menu is something people scan. Here it isn't.

Prices here are a starting point, not a quote. Say so in the description if that's how you work — "from $480, we'll confirm on the numbers" reads better than a price somebody holds you to six weeks later.

The seasonal page

This one is built around a habit rather than a page: most restaurants serve roughly the same things each autumn, each Christmas, each summer.

So the idea is that you write them once. Put a year's worth of seasonal dishes in, leave them all as drafts, and then publish each one when its time of year comes round and unpublish it when it goes. Nothing is deleted in between and nothing has to be retyped. Next October, the pumpkin dishes are still sitting there waiting.

While you're signed in, anything unpublished is marked Draft — diners can't see this, so a page that's mostly drafts still reads at a glance. Publishing is one click on the document icon under the dish.

There are no day-of-the-week controls on these two pages. Those belong to specials, which are a menu thing — a Taco Tuesday that comes and goes each week. A seasonal dish is on or off for a stretch of weeks, and publishing is how you say so.

Seasonal dishes on your home page

Whatever is published on your seasonal page also appears on your home page, in a block called In Season Now, just under Today's Specials. It's the first thing someone sees, which is usually the point of marking a dish seasonal in the first place.

You can switch that off under Site Content — "Seasonal items on the home page". Switching it off only affects the home page; the seasonal page itself stays in your menu bar.

They're kept as a separate block rather than being mixed into Today's Specials on purpose. "Today's Specials" means today. A dish that runs from September to November isn't today's anything, and putting it under that heading would make the heading wrong.

Catering packages and seasonal dishes live on their own pages. They are not mixed into your menu sections, they're not counted as specials, and they don't add options to the diner's dietary filter. A $480 hog roast will never appear between your starters and your mains.

The one exception is the In Season Now block above, which is the whole point of it and can be switched off.

The allergy notice is on both pages

Both pages describe food, so both carry the same allergy notice your menu does, and the same dietary and allergen labels are available on every item. Someone booking catering has exactly the allergy question a diner has — usually a more urgent one, since they're ordering on behalf of forty other people.