PartyPreOrders Help Manual

3      How to Create Your First Menu – Part 2 - Creating an Online Pre-Order Menu

a.       Now you are ready to create your first online menu… So click on ‘Menus’ on the left had side and you will see the following empty screen:

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a.       - Click on ‘New’ at the top right to proceed to the next screen::

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a.       CODE - First of all, give it a single word meaningful  & individual ‘Code’ –  use underscores or hyphens if necessary, eg “easter-2009” or “xmas_party_2008-1”. These codes will eventually make up the online address of your pre-order menu.

b.       DESCRIPTION – Put any meaningful friendly description in a few words for your menu, eg ”Easter Sunday Lunch”.

c.       START DATE & END DATE – To enter dates in the correct database format, click on the calendar boxes and select the start and end dates when this menu will be available. If it is for a single day then obviously select the same date twice.

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d.       DAYS OF WEEK – Choose which days of the week your menu will be available in between the start and end dates above.  [This setting is not applicable if you have only chosen a single date for the menu above.]

e.       DISABLED – when this option is chosen the menu will eventually be produced, but not available online until taken out of the box by editing the form at a later time. It is recommended that you leave this blank.

f.         START TIME & END TIME – Choose you start and end times for the menu.

g.       MINUTES BETWEEN BOOKINGS – Select the time period in minutes between bookings.

h.       MAX GUESTS – Choose the largest table size of covers which you will be catering for. [N.B. Should you need to increase the default size, then this can be changed with the ‘Company’ settings of your control panel.]

i.         STARTERS, MAINS & AFTERS – Select the necessary menu options in the adjacent tick boxes, including the suggested ‘No Course Required’ & ‘Special Course’ options.

j.         MENU CAPTION – This option depends on whether you are eventually going to use the online pre-order menu as a stand alone webpage or for advanced web-masters & programmers, embed the menu within an I-Frame on your own website. [See our I-Frame help for more information.]

Assuming you are going to use for the simple option of a stand alone pre-order webpage, then the default description will give instructions to your customers of how to fill out their online pre-order form. [You can either edit the default caption in the ‘Company’s section of you control panel or change the specific instruction for each individual menu it the ‘Caption’ box. ]

Finally ‘SAVE’ the changes to your new pre-order menu, by clicking the ‘Save’ link at the top right hand side of the form; otherwise your changes will be lost!  Your new menu’s data (after saving) should look something like this:

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THEN ITS TIME TO GO TEST