Can I offer different menus at different times of day?
When you use WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering to set up online food ordering, you might want to offer different menus at different times of day. For example, perhaps you have a lunch menu which is only available during lunch hours, and a dinner menu which is only available in the evening. Perhaps you have a Sunday lunch menu which is only available on a Sunday. Maybe you sell different menus on each day of the week.
You can do this by using WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering with the WooCommerce Opening Hours & Chosen Times plugin. This has an excellent feature which lets you select what days and times the products in each category are available.
How to set it up
Simply create one or more categories for each menu, and add the times when the products in that category are available:
It someone tries to order from a menu that is not available, then depending on how you have chosen to set up the plugin, you can display a message on the checkout page:
To prevent disappointment, we also recommend clearly stating the times when each menu is available above the food order form. You can add this information to the category description, which appears aboverthe menu items:
Can I hide menus when they are not available?
It is not possible to hide specific foods or enter menus during the times they are not available. This could be confusing for your users, who may not understand why they can see certain foods on your website at some times and not others.
Instead, we recommend listing all the foods on your website all the times, with clear labelling to indicate what times they are available.
Can a food item be in multiple categories with different availability times?
To avoid conflicts, we recommend ensuring that each food item is only in one category with restricted availability.
If you want to offer the same menu items in categories which are available on different days (e.g. if you want the Caesar Salad to be available on the Monday and Tuesday menus) then you should duplicate the product and put one version in each category. You can easily clone products with the free Duplicate Post plugin.