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How to create a touchless online menu with RMS

The benefits of an online restaurant menu are undeniable, including:

  • Reducing the printing cost
  • Environment friendly
  • Updating the menu without re-printing
  • Safer for both customers and staff: the online menu can limit cross-contamination from sharing the physical menu. It is especially important with the current COVID-19 pandemic

In this blog post, we will show you how to create a touchless online menu with our RMS component through some simple steps:

Step 1: Create online menu item

In your Joomla backend, create a menu item with the type “Restaurant Management System (RMS) > E-menus” and publish it. Then copy the menu URL for the next step.

Step 2: Generate QR code

Use an online QR code generator tool (there are many good choices, choose the one that you feel comfortable to work with), then generate your desired QR code from the URL copied from step 1. We’d like to suggest this one:

https://www.qr-code-generator.com/

Step 3: Print the QR code

Print your QR code and put them in your restaurant’s places like tables, doors.

Tips: if you want to show an online menu layout only without your website template, then you can use this URL:

https://YOUR_WEBSITE/index.php?option=com_rms&view=menus&layout=emenus&property_id=X&tmpl=component

In the above URL, replace X with your property ID in “property_id=X”, for example, if your RMS property ID is 10, then the final link will look like this:

https://YOUR_WEBSITE/index.php?option=com_rms&view=menus&layout=emenus&property_id=10&tmpl=component

We hope this blog post could be useful for you, stay safe and healthy!

Joomla 4 development and the new Joomla template

Joomla 4, the next big thing, has reached the BETA 2 version recently. We are working very hard to make sure that Solidres and Joomla 4 is continuing to be the great combination like we were with Joomla 3, or even greater.

One of the Joomla 4 biggest features is the adoption of Bootstrap 4, we hope it can end the Bootstrap version chaos at this moment when we have to support Bootstrap 2, 3 and 4 at the same time. Supporting multiple Bootstrap versions is a nightmare for developers like us, we made a lot of progress but it is never perfect.

We also have great news for our users: we are working on a brand new Joomla template built on Helix Ultimate framework. It should be released soon and it will be available as a separated purchase, please check our blog regularly to get notified about new template release.

Speedy Translate 1.9.0 (Beta) is now available

First of all, on the behalf of Solidres Team, we hope that all Solidres users and your families are still safe during this Covid outbreak. We are suffering too and we hope this situation will be improved as soon as possible, all together.

Speedy Translate 1.9.0 (Beta) is now available, this release marks a very important milestone for this product with the following big features and improvements, please read more info below, but please bear in mind that this is just a first BETA release, it is not yet ready, bugs are expected, you should only use it for previewing/testing purposes.

The new SPEEDY translation engine

In the past, Speedy Translate relies on either Joomla Multilingual Association or Falang to provide the multilingual capacity, but since v1.9.0 we now have our own SPEEDY translation engine which is developed from scratch with many improvements:

  • Multiple DBMS supports: MySQL (both MySQLi and MySQL PDO), PostgresSQL.
  • Composite keys support: now it is possible to translate Joomla Custom Fields values (Falang can not do that).
  • 3rd Joomla extensions support: at this moment we support Joomla core components, Solidres, Hikashop, J2Store, JEvents, Creative Contact Form, K2
  • Dedicated translations view so that you can check all translations in a single place.

Falang data migration tool

  • This tool makes it easier to migrate your Falang translations to Speedy Translate if you want to use the new SPEEDY translation engine.

Google Translate integration

  • Google Translate is now supported as an automatic translation service provider in addition to the current Yandex Translate option.

Testing and feedback are very welcome at this stage, please let us know what do you think via our support ticket system or forum.

Stay safe, stay well!

Solidres mobile app updates

We’d like to say thank you to all testers who joined our mobile app testing program, we received a lot of good feedback to fine tune our mobile app further and now it is officially available in Google Play Store. Regarding Apple App Store, they required us to implement the in-app purchase API to let users buy their mobile subscription directly from the app therefore we need more time for it, in the mean time you can still use the Solidres app for iOS via Test Flight app (contact us if you want to join).

Please check the following documentation link to get started:

https://www.solidres.com/documentation/joomla-documentation/13-configuration/94-how-to-configure-mobile-app

New feature highlight: Custom tab for Experience

Since Experience plugin v1.4.0, we added a new feature to allow experience owner to insert their custom tabs, this feature is very useful if you want to show extra content in front end to end users in separated new tab without having to modify the layout files. To use it, first make sure that you are using Experience plugin v1.4.0+, then edit your experience item > Custom tab and add new tab there.

All the things you need to make your work easier. Did you like Solidres?