DineKit – Restaurant Menu, Online Ordering, Table Reservations & POS

Nhật ký thay đổi

1.2.15

• New: unified guest book — every guest’s bookings, orders and loyalty in one place: lifetime spend, visits and average order on the Guests screen, and opening a booking shows floor staff who’s walking in (VIP, allergies, visits, spend, past no-shows). The guest follows you to the till too: the order pad shows who’s at the table, their allergies and their standing notes (“always tops up the wine”).
• New: pre-orders — let diners order for later in the week: a Day picker on checkout (you choose how many days ahead; off by default), only real opening hours offered, kitchen capacity respected per day. Scheduled orders arrive held for your approval, sit in their own collapsible group on the Orders board, and only join the kitchen screen a configurable lead time before their slot.
• New: the Orders board is live — new orders appear by themselves with a note and a count in the browser tab; history is day-scoped and searchable by date; phone orders are taken on a POS-style pad; every order carries a “where’s it from” badge with a channel filter.
• New: one venue, one read — booking statuses wear the same colours on every screen; the Take Order floor shows parties seated from the diary, warns when a free table is reserved soon (“free until 22:00”), starting an order on a free table books the walk-in into the diary automatically, and settling the bill completes it. The service timeline gains a live “now” line with the past greyed out, and drag-to-move bookings lands exactly where you drop.
• New: till fix-ups managers actually need — tap a settled tab in History to change a payment method (“pressed voucher, meant cash”), remove a mis-keyed amount (the tab reopens so it can be settled correctly) or reopen it outright; a “Cancel tab” escape hatch unwinds an accidentally opened table; clearing a settled table shows the last bill first. Every amend is permission-gated and written to the order’s history.
• New: firing to the kitchen now confirms exactly what’s being sent and takes a ticket note (“allergy at seat 2 — no nuts”) that shows on the Kitchen Display and prints on station tickets.
• New: rota upgrades — the shift drawer edits a whole day (split shifts as stacked time blocks with overlap warnings; one save copies the whole day to other days), unpaid breaks deducted automatically on long shifts, day-off and sick markers, and the week grid highlights today and tomorrow with past days greyed.
• New: text messages through your own Twilio (beta) — booking confirmations, automatic reminders, “your table is ready” and “order ready for collection”. Bring your own Twilio account (keys stored encrypted, step-by-step setup guide included), pay Twilio’s raw prices, and every switch is off by default. Labelled beta while field-testing completes.
• New: “may contain” allergen labelling — declare cross-contamination traces separately from ingredients; quieter badges on every menu style, ± in the printable matrix, and diners avoiding an allergen also avoid dishes with traces of it.
• New: privacy and polish — WordPress’s Export / Erase Personal Data tools now cover everything DineKit stores (erasure keeps anonymised financial records for your accounts); the translation template ships; your venue type (café, pub, bakery…) tells search engines the specific schema type; activating the plugin lands you straight in DineKit; and the “+ New” button takes a booking or seats a walk-in as a popup over whatever screen you’re on.
• Fixed: a white-screen crash when typing in the booking popup (WordPress’s emoji script clashing with the app); special characters (£, é, curly quotes) silently corrupted in order data; settled tables missing their “needs clearing” state or staying “seated” on the floor; and the floor now self-heals overnight — tabs and bookings forgotten on previous days close themselves.

1.2.14

• New: keep serving when the internet drops — the till carries on working through an outage. Open a table, add rounds, fire to the kitchen and settle up in cash exactly as normal; everything is held safely on the tablet, marked “on this device”, and posts itself to your books the moment you reconnect. Nothing is lost and nothing is charged twice, even if the connection died halfway through sending. A banner shows how many changes are still waiting, so nobody closes the tablet too early. Card, voucher and comp payments are switched off while you’re offline, because those need a live authorisation.
• New: bulk-edit your menu in a spreadsheet — export your whole menu to CSV, tweak prices, descriptions and dishes in Excel or Google Sheets, and re-import to update everything at once. Dishes are matched by name within each section, so re-importing updates your menu rather than duplicating it.
• New: cap orders per time slot — set how many online orders the kitchen can take in each time slot so a rush doesn’t swamp the pass. Slots that are already full are greyed out in the diner’s time picker, so they choose a time you can actually cook instead of being turned away at the last step.
• New: spot repeat no-shows — a guest who has failed to turn up before now gets a red flag on their booking in the diary and on their card in Guests, so you can decide whether to ask for a deposit.
• Fixed: settling a bill now flags the table as needing bussing on the floor plan. It previously never did, so a table you’d just taken payment for didn’t show as needing clearing. Any payment type — cash, card, reader, voucher or comp — now marks it, and tapping the table clears it as designed.
• Fixed: buttons and toggles no longer overflow the screen edge on a phone.

1.2.13

• New: the staff rota now groups by role — chefs, servers, bar and so on each get their own colour-coded band, so a busy week reads at a glance (switch back to a flat list any time).
• New: build the rota faster — open a shift and copy its times onto any other days for that person in one go.
• New: approve holiday right on the rota — pending time-off requests show above the grid with one-tap Approve / Decline, and an approved day immediately flags any shift that clashes with it.
• New: contracted-hours guard — give a team member their contracted weekly hours and the rota shows each person’s scheduled total, turning red when you’ve rota’d them over contract.
• New: menu text size — a Compact / Normal / Large / X-large control scales your whole public menu’s text for wall screens or phones.
• New: choose how the menu filter and allergens display — filter as compact dropdowns instead of chips, and show each dish’s allergens as icons, full text, or short codes.
• Fixed: menu colours now apply consistently on every layout. The Chalkboard layout used to force its own dark palette and ignore your colour pickers (a background change did nothing); now every layout takes its colours from the chosen template plus your overrides, so the swatches always match what diners see.

1.2.12

• New: Take Order now opens on your live floor plan — the exact room layout you built in Floor Plan, colour-coded live (green just seated, amber nearing your table-turn time, red over it) with a timer on every occupied table, so you can see who’s in, how long they’ve been sat and which tables are free to seat next. It scales to fit a phone, a tablet or a big screen.
• New: Know which tables need clearing — once a bill is settled the table shows “needs bussing” on the floor; tap it when it’s wiped down to mark it ready to seat again.
• New: Tapping a table opens the order pad as a pop-up over the floor and closes straight back to it — a fast, till-like flow instead of jumping to a separate screen and back.
• New: Live table timers on the open tab — how long it’s been open, when it opened, how many rounds have gone to the kitchen and how long the current one’s been cooking (or how long service took).
• New: A table’s order history — a history button shows that table’s previous settled bills (date, items, how they paid, total; tap one to see the items), so you can answer “what did they have last time?” on the spot.
• New: Live on-table timers in the booking diary too — a seated party’s timer turns amber as it nears your turn time and red once it’s over, so tables that need turning stand out at a glance.
• Improved: The order pad’s course tabs now filter the menu to that section (Starters, Mains, Desserts…), and a tab’s timeline (opened / fired / served / time-to-serve) shows right on the order screen.

1.2.11

• New: Install DineKit as an app on any phone or tablet — it runs from a home-screen icon, separate from wp-admin, keeps loading through a dropped connection, and many tablets stay in sync automatically (an order or booking made on one appears on the others within seconds).
• New: Kitchen Display now handles coursing properly — each round you fire is its own ticket that moves through New → Preparing → Ready on its own, so firing mains later never disturbs the starters that are already cooking, and only the new items show.
• New: Dish costs, margins & calories — record a dish’s cost to see its gross-profit margin (kept private), and show calories on the public menu for UK calorie labelling.
• New: Allergen sub-sources (Natasha’s Law) — pick “cereals containing gluten” then choose wheat/barley/rye…, or “tree nuts” → almond/hazelnut/walnut…; the menu then reads “cereals containing gluten (wheat, barley)”. Add your own custom allergens too; the 14 legal allergens stay protected.
• New: Partial refunds — refund a whole order or tick just the items that were sent back; card via Stripe, cash recorded.
• New: Set your own service charge % right on the bill (saved as your default), and when you split, each person tips their own share.
• New: Set-menu events — edit a guest’s pre-order (name, course, company) after they’ve submitted.
• Improved: One booking panel — click a reservation to mark arrived/seated, no-show or completed, move the table/time, add notes or cancel, all in one place; manage several bookings at once; walk-ins auto-seat at the best free table.
• Improved: Mark a dish unavailable (86) from the dish editor, prices show your currency symbol as you type, the dish editor is grouped into tidy collapsible sections, and editors open as large centered pop-ups.
• Fixed: taking a Card, Voucher or Comp payment no longer opens a stray print tab or crashes the till.
• Fixed: orders fired from Take Order now appear on the Kitchen Display, and a table’s bill stays open and payable at the till until you actually settle it (the kitchen marking it done no longer closes it).
• Fixed: the event pre-order link no longer auto-picks a dish — each guest actively chooses per course.
• Fixed: walk-ins respect your covers-per-hour cap, staff are archived (restorable) instead of hard-deleted, and various confirmations are now proper on-screen dialogs.

1.2.10

• New: Kitchen Display. A live kitchen board that shows incoming orders as they move through New → Preparing → Ready, with a timer on every ticket, clear item lists and kitchen notes, and one tap to move an order along. It auto-refreshes and has a full-screen mode, so you can run it on any tablet or a kitchen TV.

1.2.9

• New: attach screenshots to your support messages. Paste an image straight into the Support screen (or pick a file) and it’s added to your request — so you can show us the problem, not just describe it. Images are saved to your own site’s media library; we only receive the link.

1.2.8

• New: set your country and restaurant address in Settings. DineKit now speaks your local language for addresses — “ZIP code” and “State” in the US, “Postcode” and “County” in the UK, “Postal code” elsewhere — across the dashboard and your delivery form.
• Better local SEO worldwide: your address now feeds Google-friendly LocalBusiness structured data (street, town/city, postal code, region and country).
• Fix: menu prices now report your real currency to search engines. Previously the menu’s structured data always said GBP, even for non-UK restaurants.

1.2.7

• New: a notification bell in the top bar, on every screen, shows what needs your attention right now — orders to accept, bookings to confirm, your waitlist and pending holiday requests — and each one is a single click straight to where you deal with it. It only shows things you have permission to action.

1.2.6

• Support conversations now open at the newest message, so you don’t have to scroll to see the latest reply.
• Long support threads stay light — only the most recent messages load, with a “Show earlier messages” button for the rest.
• Emoji in support messages now display correctly.

1.2.5

• Fix: replies from the support team now appear in your Support screen straight away. On some hosts a cache could hold an older copy of the conversation, so a reply looked like it hadn’t arrived — support replies are now always fetched fresh.

1.2.4

• New: Support — message the DineKit team straight from your dashboard. No account or key needed: type your name, email and question; replies land back in the same screen (and your inbox). Track all your requests, reply, and mark them solved without leaving WordPress. Optional — the wordpress.org forum works too, and nothing is ever sent in the background.
• New: a “Common fixes” panel on the Support screen answers the most frequent questions (QR 404s, missing emails, Stripe test mode…) in under a minute, before you even need to ask.
• New: after your first accepted order or confirmed booking, DineKit asks (once, politely) whether you’d leave a review — fully dismissible, and “no thanks” means never again.
• Housekeeping: the review-request schedule is now cleaned up when the plugin is deactivated or uninstalled.

1.2.3

• Floor plan: deleting a zone now asks first and lets you move its tables to another zone (or remove them) — and if any of those tables have upcoming bookings, you can reassign each one to a free table before it goes.
• Nothing is lost: deleted zones and tables now live in a new “History” tab on the floor plan, restorable with one click.
• Joined tables are colour-matched on the plan so you can see your table groupings at a glance; a table shared by two joins blends both colours.
• Tables show a small orientation marker, so you can tell which way one faces after rotating it.
• Fixes: the “Out of service” toggle now responds wherever you click it; moving a table to another zone updates the plan straight away; the rotate button lines up with the zone selector; and the min/max party boxes are tidier.

1.2.2

• Smoother onboarding: the setup wizard now walks you through your opening hours, and you can skip ahead and pick up the rest from your dashboard whenever you like.
• Menu, ordering and booking pages are created as drafts for you to review and publish — with a clear “review & publish” prompt, and a checklist that only ticks a page off once it’s actually live.
• Dishes are never lost: removing a dish now archives it (kept for your past orders and reports) and you can restore it any time — with a heads-up if it’s on an order the kitchen is cooking right now.
• Online ordering follows your opening hours: orders are only taken while you’re open, with an optional “last orders” cut-off before closing time.
• Table bookings read your opening hours directly, so your service times live in one place.
• Polish: tidier fields inside pop-out panels, your cursor stays put while typing, and assorted small performance improvements.

1.2.1

• Release-pipeline fix only — no plugin changes. Superseded by 1.2.2, which carries this line’s content.

1.2.0

• Release-pipeline fix only — no plugin changes. Superseded by 1.2.2, which carries this line’s content.

1.1.0

• Commission-free online ordering — takeaway, collection and delivery, with a diner-facing menu, dish customizations, and printable kitchen/bar tickets.
• Contactless QR “order at the table”.
• Commission-free table bookings: drag-and-drop floor plan with joinable tables, a public booking form (block + [dinekit_booking] shortcode) with live availability, waitlist, covers-per-hour pacing and deposits.
• Booking diary with statuses, email notifications, and printable reservation slips.
• Set-menu events with per-guest pre-orders via a share link — guests choose their courses and flag allergens; the kitchen gets a consolidated prep sheet you can print.
• Card payments with your own Stripe keys (encrypted at rest) — booking deposits and order payments, Apple Pay and Google Pay. You keep 100%.
• Guest CRM: repeat diners with the allergies they’ve told you about, carried across every visit.
• Staff logins with a role-to-permission matrix and an activity/audit log; review-request emails to win diners back.
• Dynamic dish customizations (removable ingredients + choose-your-options with prices), six menu templates and colour theming.

1.0.0

• First public release.
• Menu builder with menus, sections and items — photos, badges and multiple prices per item, drag-and-drop ordering, inline editing with autosave.
• UK-14 regulated allergens pre-loaded with icons, tooltips and a printable allergen matrix (Natasha’s Law friendly).
• Dietary labels (vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, halal, spicy — and your own).
• DineKit Menu block and [dinekit_menu] shortcode with three layouts (list, card grid, chalkboard) and 1–4 column options.
• Design & Preview screen to choose a style and copy the shortcode.
• Print-ready QR table cards and A4 posters that open your menu on a phone.
• Opening hours with holiday overrides and a live open/closed status.
• Menu, MenuItem and LocalBusiness schema.org output for SEO.
• Works with block and classic themes. No dependencies.