Can I add food order forms to the WooCommerce shop and category pages?
The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin creates a new page listing all the food products, structured into categories. This allows you to add a food ordering section to your website without affecting your standard store pages, e.g. if you are using these to sell other types of product.
If you prefer, then you can enable the food order form layout on the shop and category pages which are provided by WooCommerce itself. This is how to do it.
WooCommerce Shop page
WooCommerce creates a 'Shop' page which lists all your products. This normally lists the products in the default layout which comes from your theme or WooCommerce itself.
If you'd prefer to use the food order form layout for the Shop page - which comes from the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin - then simply select the 'Shop' page as the Restaurant Order page in the plugin settings.
Product category pages
WooCommerce creates a separate archive page listing the products in each category. You can also enable the food order form layout on these pages. To do it, simply enable the Category Pages option in the plugin settings.
When this option is enabled, the food products will be listed on the category pages as follows.
Categories without sub-categories
If you are on a product category page which doesn't have any child categories, then the products will be listed like this:
- First, the category title is displayed, plus the category description if your theme is set up to display this. (Note: Enabling category descriptions in the Order form setting will not affect whether or not they are displayed on category pages, because this comes from the theme rather than WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering.)
- Next, the products are displayed in a single food order form.
Categories that have sub-categories
If you are on a parent category page which has one or more sub-categories, then the products will be listed like this:
- First, the parent category title is displayed, plus the category description if your theme is set up to display this. (Note: Enabling category descriptions in the Order form setting will not affect whether or not they are displayed on category pages, because this comes from the theme rather than WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering.)
- Next, the navigation bar will appear (if enabled) so that customers can jump to a specific category. This will only appear if there are at least two navigation links to display. For example, it will be hidden if there is only one child category.
- If the parent category contains any products which are not in any of the child categories, then these will be listed next.
- Below, all the sub-categories are listed individually with their products underneath each one. Each sub-category is listed equally, regardless of whether it is a child or grandchild category.
How to configure food order forms on the Shop and category pages
The food order forms on your category pages will inherit the global settings from the plugin settings page.
The only exception is that the restaurant details (if set) only appear at the top of the food order form on the main Shop page. To avoid duplication, they are then hidden from each category page. If you would like to show the restaurant details and opening hours on every category page then we recommend adding them as a text widget. That way, they appear alongside the food order form instead of forcing customers to scroll down on every category page before they can see the list of food products.
Can I re-order the categories?
The order of the categories and sub-categories listed on the page comes from WooCommerce itself. You can easily change this using the free Category Order and Taxonomy Terms Order plugin.
If you want to display certain products at the top of the menu, then we recommend creating a featured category and re-ordering your categories so that this appears first.
Can I have different settings for each category?
The food order form settings can’t be adjusted on a per-category basis. To do this, you should create category pages manually with a shortcode (which allows you to use shortcode options to configure each category order form individually) instead of using the WooCommerce category pages which all share the same settings. If required, you can then use the free Redirection plugin to redirect your actual category pages to the new pages where you have added the shortcodes.
Can I list categories in the sidebar throughout my website?
Yes, we have a separate article on how to do that.