In-Progress: Allergen and Info Icons for Online Restaurant Menus


It’s not completely ready yet, but this is what it looks like.

In working on various web sites for restaurants, I’ve found there really aren’t any good methods for displaying menus. Using JPG images of menu pages or even PDFs of those pages flies in the face of a lot of what people believe should be done, so they’re termed “unacceptable”. Many restaurant web sites are built using the WordPress platform. Plugins for restaurant menus for said platform makes sense. But many of the restaurant menu plugins that work aren’t up-to-date with the current platform, and the ones that are updated correctly are missing some vital features, including being responsive enough to work well on smart phones.

It also stands to reason that WordPress crosses international boundaries. For example, as of Dec. 13, 2014, 14 allergen icos are required on restaurant menus in the UK. But none of the available WordPress plugins address the use of those icons.

What we’ve ended up doing is to begin the development of a new plugin for WordPress that creates restaurant menus the way we want to see them. Above are some of the icons we’ve assembled for use in the plugin, including the official UK icons, along with some other icons developers might want to use. They’re not quite ready yet, but at least we have some progress.

We hope to have the plugin ready in a month or so, if only to be able to test it on our own web sites prior to releasing it into the wild.

We’ll see how it goes …

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