Welcome. This lesson is part of our free course “Building a Restaurant Management Platform with Wildcloud”.
In the previous lesson, we created the frontend dashboard tenant and made the initial configurations.
In this lesson, we will build a frontend dashboard where our users will be able to view and manage everything that has to do with selling food online:
- Restaurant orders
- Sales reports
- Discount coupons
- Customer profiles
- Food menu items
- Food categories
- Restaurant team/user profiles
- Store settings and details
- Taxes
- Payment gateways
- Time to auto refresh orders page
- Site’s logo
1- Open the dashboard site
You need to start by opening the site that you will use as a frontend dashboard for the platform. This is the site we created in the previous lesson.
When you log in to your Wildcloud account, you need to open the Restaurant Manager Application (it’s not the storefront application).
Now you need to click on Dashboard to view more details of this site.
Now you need to click on Login as [your username] to open the wp-admin dashboard of that site.
2- Building the frontend dashboard pages
To build the frontend dashboard pages with WP Frontend Admin, you have at least 3 options. You can read this tutorial to learn about some ways to display WordPress admin pages on the frontend.
Although our frontend dashboard templates were designed to simplify the process of creating a frontend dashboard for your platforms, we wanted to simplify your process even more, so we share with you a zip file containing the pages you need to create a frontend dashboard for your restaurant management platform.
Below you can see what the frontend dashboard for managing restaurants will look like if you use the page templates we have included in the zip file.
Important: In order to download the frontend dashboard pages, you need to be a WP Frontend Admin user with the Platform plan. This zip file contains 5 pages, as detailed below.
Frontend dashboard pages:
1- QR Code: this page will allow users of your platform to view a QR code that will take users who scan the QR to the restaurant menu (which will be the home page of the restaurant site). We put it as part of the frontend dashboard so that it is always available to the restaurant’s site administrators, and they can scan it, copy it, print it, show it to the restaurant’s customers so they can see the menu and order from their cell phones, etc.
2- Sales: This page contains 4 sections/tabs that allow you to view and manage restaurant orders, view sales reports, discount coupons that you can use as a marketing strategy, and customer information.
3- Meals: This page contains two sections that allow you to view and manage products (dishes, drinks, delicacies, etc.) and product categories.
4- Team: This page allows you to view and manage the users of the site.
5- Settings: This page contains three sections that will allow your users to select general store settings, tax settings, payment gateway settings, and the time at which the order page will be automatically updated, so that your cooks and restaurant staff are always up-to-date with the orders placed. Your users will also be able to select the restaurant’s menu design and the restaurant’s website logo.
IMPORTANT: As you can see, these pages contain different tabs and require you to select colors, fonts, etc. Therefore, we have created the zip file, so that you only need to download the templates for each page and import them into the site.
a) Import the dashboard page templates
To import the page templates, you need to go to Templates > Saved Templates in your wp-admin dashboard.
Once you’re there, click on Import Templates.
Next, click on Choose File, locate the template in your computer, and click on Import Now.
b) Create the pages
After importing the templates, you can start creating the dashboard pages.
Go to Pages > All Pages > Add New Page.
Add the page title and click on Edit with Elementor.
Once you’re in Elementor:
- Click on the page’s Settings button.
- Select Page Layout: Elementor Canvas
- Click on Add template.
In the Library go to My Templates, select the page you will import and click on Insert.
Important: Since the QR Code page already contains the shortcode and doesn’t need any other configuration on the frontend, you can Publish the page.
With the other pages (Sales, Meals, Team and Settings), which contain the WP Frontend Admin shortcode to display admin pages on the frontend, you need to Preview the page to set up the page on the frontend, using the Quick Settings panel.
Select the page details
Once you’re viewing the page on the frontend, you can start setting up the frontend page. For example, you can select the page details:
- Preview site: You can select a specific site to preview. In this example, we’re prewieving the dashboard site, but if we had more sites on our Wildcloud application, we could select another site.
- Page title: Enter the page title here.
- URL slug: Enter the URL slug of the page here.
- Page template: “Elementor Canvas” in this case.
- Add to this menu: If you have previously created a navigation menu, you can select it here. If not, you can manually add the dashboard pages to the navigation menu later.
Hide all the unnecesary elements
If there are any elements you would like to hide from your frontend admin pages, you can use the Hide element button. You just have to click on Hide element and then click on the element you want to hide or remove from this frontend wp-admin page. This is great if you want to simplify the page or remove links or buttons to places that are not within the frontend dashboard site.
Hide admin notices added by other plugins or themes
If you want to prevent your users from viewing admin content like update or upgrade notices, update database notices added by specific plugins, etc., you need to tick the Hide admin notices added by other plugins or themes checkbox.
Rename admin fields, metaboxes, buttons
You can rename admin fields, metaboxes and buttons, as well as edit any other text on your frontend pages.
- Click on Edit texts
- Edit all the texts you want to change
- Click on Stop editing texts
Disable admin columns
If you are editing any page that displays lists of products, orders, etc., you can disable the admin columns that you do not want to be displayed on the page. Just check the checkboxes of the pages you want to hide in the Quick Settings panel.
Select required plugins or themes
WP Frontned Admin allows you to select any plugin or theme required for the page to work in the frontend. You can select the required plugin and/or theme, and in the WP Frontend Admin settings you can choose whether you want to hide a frontend dashboard page in case the plugin or theme is not activated for the site being edited from the frontend dashboard.
Once you’re done editing your frontend admin page, you need to click on Save to apply the changes.
Set up the navigation menu
Once you have created the pages, you can set up the navigation menu.
In case you haven’t added a navigation menu, you need to enter the Menu name and click on Create Menu.
Next, you need to add the dashboard pages to the menu and add menu icons. Click on Add icon on any menu item.
Select the icon and click on Save.
Once you have added the pages and menu icons, you need to click on Save Menu.
After setting up all the pages and the navigation menu, this is what your frontend dashboard should look like:
Selecting the front-end dashboard settings
Once your frontend dashboard pages and navigation menu are ready, you need to select the frontend dashboard settings.
Go to Frontend Admin > Settings > General.
Once there, you can start selecting all the settings you want.
You can read the explanation of every setting, but to save some time, we recommend you to select these settings:
- Add “Edit” link after post content = No
- Disable the quick settings = Not needed
- Disable the wp-admin notices when viewing on the frontend = Yes
- Redirect users to this page after publishing a post = Redirect to the list of posts
- Redirect users to this page after creating a post with pending review status = Redirect to the list of posts
- Disable the message indicating why a page didn’t load = No
- Auto select this user role when we are creating users in the frontend = You decide
- Hide pages containing our shortcode = Yes
- Default post/page editor for all the post types = Regular WordPress editor
- Hide WooCommerce pages = Yes
Second, let’s select the access restrictions settings.
Go to Frontend Admin > Settings > Access restrictions.
Once there, you can start selecting all the settings you want.
For example, we will select these settings:
- Enable the wp-admin access restrictions = No, for now.
- Access restriction: What wp-admin pages can be viewed on the frontend = Click on the “Allow pages that contain our shortcode currently” link.
- Access restriction: Who can access the wp-admin dashboard = install plugins
- Access restriction: Frontend dashboard URL = Paste the URL of your frontend dashboard site, or the URL of the frontend dashboard page you want your users to be redirected to when accessing the frontend dashboard.
- Message to display when a page did not load for a technical error = We will leave it empty
- Blacklisted Page URL (optional) = We will leave it empty
- Wrong Permissions Page URL (optional) = We will leave it empty
- Wrong Permissions Message (optional) = We will leave it empty
- These user roles will use the frontend dashboard = shop_manager
- Hide pages when a required plugin is deactivated = Yes
- Hide pages when a required theme is deactivated = Yes
Third, let’s select the appearance settings.
Go to Frontend Admin > Settings > Appearance.
Once there, you can start selecting all the settings you want.
For example, we will select these settings:
- Admin CSS = We’ll leave it empty
- Hide admin bar on the frontend = This is unnecessary
- Maximum content width in regular mode = We’ll leave it empty
- Loading animation style = Wave (or any style you want)
- Custom GIF image URL = We’ll leave it empty
- Loading animation color = We’ll select #1e73be (or any color you want)
- Admin JS = We’ll leave it empty
- Show floating edit buttons in the frontend = No
- Admin footer html = We’ll leave it empty
- Show the wp screen options in the frontend = No
- Use the wp screen options configured by one user for all users = We’ll leave it empty
- Clean Admin Look : Primary color for admin content = #000000
- Clean Admin Look : Hover color for links and buttons = #E53F31
Propagating frontend dashboard settings to all sites of our Wildcloud application
In order for these settings to propagate to all sites in our Wildcloud application, we need to apply them to the version of our application.
For this, WP Frontend Admin automatically generates a configuration .zip file that we can install as a plugin on our application version.
Important – We won’t have to do the same thing every time we apply changes to the dashboard site, since the configuration file will be automatically updated and used by all sites/tenants of our application. This file is used one time only.
This is one of the great advantages of the Wildcloud ecosystem, since all sites share the same codebase (plugins, themes, language files). And yet, the database of each site is not shared.
After saving the changes to our WP Frontend Admin settings, we need to move to the Multitenant tab and click on Download file.
Now we can close the dashboard site and open our application’s version Editor.
Once we’re in the wp-admin dashboard of our application’s version, let’s upload the zip file as a plugin.
- Go to Plugins > Add New Plugin.
- Click on Upload plugin.
- Click on Choose file and locate the “wp-frontend-admin-configuration.zip” file.
- Click on Install Now.
Important. You don’t need to activate this plugin, it will work as the configuration file regardless if it’s activated or deactivated.
After installing the configuration file as a plugin, you need to deploy the version so that all sites/tenants share the file.
On your production version, click on Deploy.
Finally, add a Name and some Comment for this version deployment, and click Submit.
Done. We have created a front-end dashboard for our platform.
The configuration file contains all the dashboard settings that you need, and it also syncs the WP Frontend Admin license across all your sites/tenants.
In the next lesson, we are going to create a site template that will be cloned to clients’ sites every time they create a new site on our platform.
This way, they won’t have to design or configure the site from scratch.