Catering and seasonal menus

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Some of what a restaurant sells doesn't belong on the menu. A pig roast for forty isn't something you order at a table, and a pumpkin ravioli that runs six weeks each fall shouldn't be retyped 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.

Importing a catering or seasonal menu

If you already have a catering sheet or a seasonal board, you don't have to type it in. Press Import from a photo or text at the top of either page, then upload a photo or PDF, or paste the text. Everything goes onto that page, hidden, for you to check and publish.

For seasonal dishes, it copies when each one is around if your board says so, like “February to May”. It won't mark anything as in season now. That's yours to do, as are the dietary and allergen labels.

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. A package needs a paragraph: what's included, how many it feeds, how much notice you need. On the menu a description is trimmed to a line or two, because a menu is something people scan. Here it isn't.

The seasonal page

Most restaurants serve roughly the same things each fall, each Christmas, each summer.

So you write them once. Put a year's worth of seasonal dishes in, publish them, and tell people when each one is around. Nothing is deleted in between. Next October the pumpkin dishes are still there.

Publishing a dish here puts it on your seasonal page, where diners see the whole year at once. Somebody reading in July can find out the pumpkin ravioli comes back in September, and plan for it.

Two switches, and they do different jobs

Each dish here has two controls under it:

• Publish (the document icon) — is this dish on your seasonal page at all? Published dishes are visible to diners year-round.
• In season (the sun icon) — are you serving it right now? This is what puts it on your home page. A filled sun means yes; an outline means it's listed but not on yet.

So when a season turns, you don't republish anything. You click one sun on and the old one off, and that's the whole job.

While you're signed in, anything unpublished is marked Draft — diners can't see this. Drafts are for dishes you're still writing; a dish that's finished but out of season should be published with its sun off, not left as a draft.

When it's available

Each dish has a When it's available box, a short line shown under it on your seasonal page. It's free text on purpose, because a kitchen doesn't think in dates:

• September to November
• December, and only December
• From the first frost until it runs out
• While the asparagus lasts

Write whatever is true. It's a note for diners, not a schedule; nothing reads it to decide what to show. That's what the sun is for, and it stays in your hands. A late frost isn't something to argue with a calendar about.

Seasonal dishes on your home page

The dishes you've marked in season appear on your home page too, in a block called In Season Now, just under Today's Specials. Not everything on your seasonal page, just what you're serving now.

That's the split doing its work: your seasonal page is the year, your home page is today.

You can switch the block 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.

Nothing here shows up on your menu

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 pig roast will never appear between your appetizers and your entrées.

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 the same allergy question a diner has, and usually a more urgent one: they're ordering for forty other people.