A menu is how your menu items are presented to a customer: what is on it, in what order, under which headings, at what price. The same menu item can sit on several menus — a lunch menu, a catering menu, a seasonal one — and each menu decides how it appears there. Menus are what your website and your ordering portals display.
Create the menu
- Go to Food → Menus and click Create Menu.
- Give it a Menu Name.
- Choose the tribe switches — whether tribes see it, may edit prices, and may disable items. See What tribes can do with menus.
- Tick Show Menu Item Price if your website should show the price beside each item on this menu. It is off until you tick it.
- Save, then click the menu's name in the list to open it and start building.
Set up website fields
An organisation Developer or Gorilla Dash administrator can set up these fields. If you do not have this access, ask your organisation’s developer to configure them. To add content beyond the standard menu fields, go to Food → Settings. Use Menu Section Custom Fields for content that belongs to a section and Menu Offering Custom Fields for content that belongs to a listing. Add the fields you need, choose the same field types used by website page templates, and drag them into the order in which they should appear. Save each card.
The new fields then appear when you create or edit a menu section or listing. Enter the website content there and save the menu record. Changing the field order in Food Settings changes the editing and website order without moving the saved content between fields.
Ordinary menu editors can enter the field values without developer access. Edit these values in the original language; translated menu screens leave the original custom content unchanged. If the fields cannot load, you can still save the ordinary menu fields without replacing the saved custom content.
Saving a change to a field type asks for confirmation. Values saved with a different type are hidden until you enter suitable content. Reverting the type can show the previous value again if the menu record has not been saved in between. Removing a definition hides that field from every menu record; newly added fields do not automatically recover its old content.
Add sections
Sections are the headings on the menu — Boards, Boxes, Drinks. Click Create Menu Section, give it a Section Name, an optional Section Caption shown under the heading, and choose Show on nav if a website should offer a jump-link to it. Drag sections to reorder them.
Add items to a section
Inside a section, add a listing and choose what kind it is.
| Listing type | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Single Item | One menu item at one price. The everyday case. |
| Group of Items (Customer selects one) | One line on the menu that offers several menu items, of which the customer picks one — "Choose your board" with three boards behind it. The line shows one name and one price. |
Every listing can override the menu item's Name and its Price: leave Use default price on to charge the item's default price, or switch it off to charge something else on this menu only. A Group of Items listing gets three more overrides of its own — a Description, a Square Photo and a Photo Description — because the group is the thing on the menu rather than any one item behind it.
External Order URL sends the customer somewhere else to order this item — a third-party ordering page, say — instead of adding it to a Gorilla Dash cart. Pairing suggests another item alongside this one.
Copying a menu
The fastest way to start a seasonal or regional menu is Copy Menu on the Menus list. It duplicates the sections and listings — pointing at the same menu items, so nothing is duplicated underneath — and you then remove, add and reprice.