Catering Meals with specific dates

[Ashley Smith]

Hi

I have a catering business that delivers home-style meals to customers from Monday to Friday, Customers have a choice of 3 meals (dietary options) each day (see example that follows) as well as standard meals that are available every day.

Monday: Hungarian Goulash; Herby Pork Fillet or Chicken Paella
Tuesday: Moussaka; Chicken Curry; Pork Chop
etc
Standard Items
Roast Chicken
Milk
Bread
etc

If an event is equivalent to a meal (e.g. Beef Curry) in my application – surely we can use this plug-in to allow customers to order specific meals on the days that we prepare them? We also need to cut-off orders at 9:30am each day so that we can source ingredients and prepare the meals for delivery in the early evening.

Please advise if this plug in will work for my application as I do not wish to continually customise my application each time there is an upgrade.

Thanx
Ashley

[George]

Hi Ashley,

Thanks for reaching out, and for even considering our plugins for your catering site – it’s an interesting application of our plugins!

Having each “event” actually be a meal is clever, and may work quite well here in combination with one of our ticketing add-ons. Let me explain:

• You could make each meal an Event, as you said.
• Then, you could use a ticketing add-on to actually sell “tickets” on the “event”, where each ticket is really just an order of that meal.
• During check-out process, users enter their address, phone number, etc.
• Tickets come with both a “Stock” feature, so if there are only 125 total Beef Curries available that day, then you make the “Beef Curry” event, and add a ticket for it, and set the ticket Stock to 125. After 125 are sold, no more can be bought.
• Tickets also come with an “End Sale” date feature – this lets you set a date and time after which the tickets will no longer be for sale. If you only have 125 Beef Curry and can’t accept orders for them after 11:00am on the day it’s available, just set the stock to 125, the “End Sale” date to the date of the event itself, and the “End Sale” time to 11:00am.

I hope this information helps!

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Next, ended with this comment here:

Please advise if this plug in will work for my application as I do not wish to continually customise my application each time there is an upgrade.

To have everything working as hoped for on your site, some minor customizations may be required – adding a few filters to your theme’s functions.php to change the word “Event” and “Events” to “Meal” and “Meals”. Some template overrides to get things looking just how you want…

However, we built our template overrides system specifically so that it would not need to be re-customized after each upgrade. If you’re curious how it works, check out our Themer’s Guide here → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/themers-guide/

Using those methods would mean that you can make some minor tweaks to the display of The Events Calendar by adding files to your theme, not to the plugin itself – then, when the plugin gets an update, you simply update the plugin and it all gets updated “underneath” your template overrides with no conflict! 🙂

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In closing, it does seem like The Events Calendar in combination with a Ticketing add-on for it could work quite well for your site. It’s worth noting that The Events Calendar itself is completely free → http://wordpress.org/plugins/the-events-calendar/

And that we can refund any purchase without question within thirty days.

So, if you have the time, try out The Events Calendar and a ticketing add-on, play around with a bit, and get a feel for how it will work for you. If it won’t work for you, shoot us an email at [email protected] with your purchase receipt and a link to this very forum thread here, and we’ll issue a refund immediately 🙂

Cheers!
George

[Support Droid]

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