Menus and publishing

Menu edits are drafts until you publish, publishing takes a numbered snapshot that goes live within about a minute, and marking an item out of stock skips all of that and applies immediately. That is the whole model; the rest of this page is the detail.

The pieces of a menu

• Categories group items and set their order on the page: Starters, Mains, Drinks.
• Items carry a name, a price, an optional description, and an optional photo (JPEG, PNG, or WebP, up to 2 MB). Photos make menus sell; use real pictures of your food.
• Option groups attach to items for sizes, toppings, sides, and preparation choices. Each option can add to the price. The group sets a minimum and maximum number of choices, so "pick exactly one size" and "up to three toppings" are both one setting.

Drafts and publishing

Everything you edit is a draft: customers keep seeing the last published menu while you work. Edited rows are badged in the editor, and the Publish dialog lists every change you are about to make live, so you always know what you are shipping. Publishing creates menu version 1, 2, 3 and so on, and the new version reaches customers within about a minute.

A new photo on an item follows the same rule: it appears to customers on the next publish, not the moment you upload it.

Out of stock is faster than a publish

Selling out of something mid-service should take one tap, so availability is deliberately outside the draft cycle. Toggle an item (or a single option, like one topping) off and it shows as unavailable to customers right away, without publishing. Toggle it back in the morning. The editor notes when each item was marked out, so you can see at a glance what got 86'd during service.

Hours, preparation time, and pausing

Opening hours gate ordering: outside them, the page shows customers when you open next instead of taking orders. Preparation time does two jobs: it drives the "Ready around" estimate customers see, and it sets how far ahead a scheduled order must be placed. Customers can schedule pickup up to 7 days ahead, on 15-minute slots inside your opening hours.

Pausing is for the moments hours cannot predict: the kitchen is slammed, the oven died. Pause from the admin (or the kitchen display) for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, or until you resume; ordering stops immediately and the page tells customers when you are back. Ordering resumes on its own when the pause elapses.

Starting from zero

Publishing works even with an empty menu, which creates your public page so you can see it live before the menu is finished. There is no menu import today: menus are entered by hand in the editor. A typical single-page menu takes an afternoon.