This is the second lesson of our free course “Building a Restaurant Management Platform on Wildcloud”. In this lesson, we are going to install all the necessary plugins to build our online food selling platform. These plugins will allow us to create a web app to sell food online without coding anything.
Plugins to build a restaurant management platform on Wildcloud
These are the plugins you need to install and activate in order to build your Wildcloud restaurant management platform:
- WP Frontend Admin [Premium]: This plugin will allow you to create a frontend dashboard, displaying any wp-admin page in the frontend. For this, you will use a specific site or tenant of your platform, and when platform users try to access the wp-admin dashboard on their own site, they will be automatically redirected to the dashboard site, so you will be able to create a fully customized user interface to build a professional WaaS platform. The best part is that it’s fully compatible with the multitenancy structure used by Wildcloud.
You can try the premium plugin on your website for free for 7 days.
- WaaS Client [Free] (Download): This plugin allows you to select tenants/sites as client sites and assign them a specific tenant role (more about tenant roles in future lessons).
- WooCommerce [Free] (Download): This plugin will allow your customers to build online stores for their restaurants to sell food and manage orders. They will be able to create and manage menu dishes, set up payment gateways, view and manage restaurant orders, discount coupons, etc.
- WooCommerce Food [Premium] (Puchase here): This plugin modifies the WooCommerce create/edit products form to convert them into meal creation forms where you can set food types, flavors, nutritional information, meal addons, etc.
- Kaya QR Code Generator [Free] (Download): Restaurant owners on your platform will be able to use a QR code so that visitors to the restaurant can access the menu by simply scanning it. This is very convenient to boost biosecurity, save money on printing menus, etc.
- WooCommerce Auto Refresh Orders Page [Free] (Download): We will display the list of orders in the global frontend dashboard, and we will use this plugin for the orders’ page to auto-refresh periodically. In this way, the restaurant cooks will have the orders at hand and always up to date.
- Elementor [Free] (Download): Elementor is a page builder for WordPress. We have developed some front-end dashboard templates based on Elementor, which you can easily import to create your front-end dashboard easily.
- Elementor Header & Footer Builder [Free] (Download): Our front-end dashboard templates use some elements like navigation menus, so this plugin is required if you’re using our dashboard templates.
- JetSticky For Elementor [Free] (Download): This plugin allows some of our front-end dashboard templates to have sticky navigation menus.
- Menu Icons by ThemeIsle [Free] (Download) or WP Menu Icons [Free] (Download): These plugins allow us to add beautiful icons to front-end dashboard templates automatically.
- Shortcode in Menus [Free] (Download): With this plugin, we can add shortcodes to navigation menus.
The following two plugins are optional, but useful:
- User Menus [Free] (Download): This plugin allows you to add items with conditional visibility to your navigation menus. You can add menu links that are only visible to logged-in/logged-out users with specific user roles.
- User Role Editor [Free] (Download): This plugin allows you to edit the capabilities of your user roles or create new user roles. This is useful when you want to add more permissions to the existing user roles, to access specific admin pages from the frontend dashboard.
Recommendation: Install your favorite WordPress themes
As you may have noticed, the default WordPress themes do not allow many customization options (site logo, navigation menus, different appearance styles, etc.).
Therefore, it is important that you install your favorite theme, which you will use primarily to design the site templates and secondarily to set a logo for the frontend dashboard site.
In this course, we will use the Kadence theme, but you can use your favorite theme.
Where to install the plugins
Since the Wildcloud ecosystem uses versions as the codebase of your entire application, the plugins must be installed on the version of the empty application we created in the previous lesson (Restaurant Manager App in this example, not the storefront application).
This is what you will see when you log in to your Wildcloud account.
We need to open the empty application we created in the previous lesson (Restaurant Manager App, in this example).
Click Go To App.
Open the Production version’s dashboard by clicking on Editor.
That will take you to the version’s wp-admin dashboard, where you need to install the plugins at Plugins > Add New Plugin.
You can install the plugins by uploading the zip files or install them from the WordPress repository.
Once you install and activate the plugins, you’re ready to continue building your restaurant management platform.
In the next lesson, we will see how to create a tenant role and deploy the version.