Description
Ardoise puts today’s menu on your restaurant website from your phone, in a few taps.
In a busy kitchen, nobody logs into WordPress at 11:30 to find the right page and edit it. So the website shows last Tuesday’s dish, and customers call to ask what’s on today.
Ardoise works like the chalkboard outside your door:
- Open the Ardoise page on your phone (it’s an icon on your home screen).
- Type today’s starter, dish and dessert, with their prices.
- Tap Publish. It’s on your website. That’s it.
At midnight, the board clears itself. Your website never shows an old menu.
Made for
Restaurants, bistros, brasseries, cafés, canteens, caterers, bakeries, food trucks: anyone whose menu changes every day.
Simple on purpose
- One screen, four lines: starter, main course, dessert, set menu, each with its price.
- No login on the phone: a private link opens a page made for small screens, with big fields and big buttons. Add it to your home screen once.
- Nothing to set up: activate, add the block to your menu page, open the link on your phone. Done in five minutes.
- Clears itself at midnight: no more “dish of the day” from last week.
- Looks like a real chalkboard: chalk style with a bundled handwritten font. Change the colours and text size in the block settings.
Safe
- The private link contains a random 40-character key and only gives access to the board, nothing else on your site.
- Add an optional PIN code: each phone enters it once, then it is remembered for 30 days.
- Lost a phone or shared the link by mistake? Create a new link in one click: the old one stops working immediately.
- Wrong links and wrong PIN codes are limited per visitor.
Works with your site
- Gutenberg block “Ardoise”, or the
[ardoise]shortcode for page builders (Elementor, Divi…). - Purges the page cache of WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache when the board changes or expires.
- Staff who can edit pages can also update the board from the WordPress admin.
- No account, no external service, no tracking. Everything stays on your site.
Shortcode
[ardoise] shows the board.
title="Lunch"to change the title,title=""to hide it
Credits
The chalk style uses the Caveat font by The Caveat Project Authors, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (see assets/fonts/OFL.txt). The font is bundled with the plugin: nothing is loaded from Google or any other service.
Screenshots
Blocks
This plugin provides 1 block.
- Ardoise Shows today's specials board.
Installation
- Install and activate the plugin.
- Add the “Ardoise” block (or the
[ardoise]shortcode) to the page where your menu should appear. - Go to Ardoise in the admin menu and copy the private link.
- Open the link on your phone and add it to your home screen.
- Optional: in Ardoise > Settings, set the title and a PIN code.
FAQ
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Can someone else change my board?
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Only someone who has the private link. The link contains a random 40-character key that cannot be guessed, and it gives access to the board only, not to the rest of your site. For extra safety, add a PIN code in the settings: a phone that has the link must also enter the code once. If the link is shared by mistake, create a new one from the Ardoise page.
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What happens at midnight?
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The board is hidden automatically, so an old menu is never shown. The next day, publish the new menu from your phone.
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The board still shows after the hiding time. Why?
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A page cache is probably serving an old copy of the page. Ardoise purges the cache of WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache automatically. For other caches or a server cache, purge the cache or exclude the page. The automatic purge relies on WP-Cron, which runs when your site gets visits. Developers can hook into the
ardoise_purge_cacheaction. -
Several people update the board. Is that possible?
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Yes. Share the private link with them (and the PIN code if you set one). Each phone is remembered separately.
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Does the plugin send data anywhere?
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No. Everything stays in your WordPress database.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Ardoise” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Ardoise” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.1.0
- New hooks for add-ons: several boards, extra line data, board styles and phone page assets.
- Internal improvements, no change for existing boards.
1.0.0
- First release.