Complete the setup assistant
The setup assistant is the one-time interview that creates the restaurant's structure. In four steps it records who you are, which menu types you sell, the colors the menus use, and the layout each menu is published with — and then it builds the content types, categories, item fields, styles and home page to match.
Run it before creating any content. It is the only screen in Fenómenus that decides structure rather than editing it.
Before you start
- Know which menu types the restaurant actually sells today. Enabling everything "just in case" leaves empty menus in the guest navigation.
- Have the logo ready in the media library.
- Have a business description written, or the time to write one properly.
- Set the site language before running the assistant, because the language you start from becomes the source language of every menu.
Open the assistant
Until setup has been completed, every administration screen shows a warning notice:
The setup wizard has not been completed. Please finish setting it up.
Follow that link. The assistant lives at Setup assistant, reachable from the notice, and later from Settings → Restaurant settings → Restaurant setup → Restaurant settings.
The four steps appear as a numbered navigation:
- Your restaurant
- What do you sell?
- Colors
- Design & tools
Each step ends with Save and Continue, and step 4 ends with Save and Finish. Nothing is applied until you save that step.
Step 1 — Your restaurant
| Field | What it sets |
|---|---|
| Name of your restaurant | The WordPress site title, used across the site and in menu headers. |
| Your logo | The logo used by the theme, on both desktop and mobile. |
| Business description | The description the AI tools read to understand what the restaurant is. |
| Translations | When a translation layer is installed, the additional languages to enable next to the current site language. |
Spend real time on the business description. It is not marketing copy for guests — it is the context every AI feature uses later, so a vague paragraph produces vague results for as long as it stays vague. Describe the cuisine, the setting, the specialities and what makes the house different.
The current site language is shown but cannot be changed here. Additional languages appear as checkboxes; ticking one enables it, unticking one disables it.
Step 2 — What do you sell?
Tick the menu types the restaurant sells: À la carte menu, Terrace menu, Breakfast, Desserts, Bar menu, Wine list, Cocktails, Beverages, Tasting menu, Set menu.
Saving this step is the structural decision of the whole setup, and the assistant asks you to confirm it:
Are you sure? This action cannot be undone.
When you confirm, Fenómenus creates for each selected type its content type, its category taxonomy, and the supporting taxonomies it needs — for example the NOT suitable for and Options lists on the à la carte menu. It also enables allergen information on the food menu types, seeds the wine list with its default wine categories when the wine list is selected, and refreshes the site's permalinks.
Two consequences are worth knowing before you confirm:
- The step runs once. Re-opening it afterwards simply reports that the content types have already been generated.
- Adding a menu type later is done from Settings → Restaurant settings → Content settings → Content types, not by re-running this step.
Step 3 — Colors
| Option | Effect |
|---|---|
| What style do you like? — Light or Dark | Sets the background, main text and link colors of the public site. |
| Highlight color 1 | Becomes the primary color family of the palette. |
| Highlight color 2 | Becomes the secondary color family. |
From the two highlight colors the assistant builds the full palette: five shades derived from each one, plus a fixed set of neutrals from white to black. It also creates the standard button styles — filled primary, filled secondary, dark and light outline, and dark and light underlined — and regenerates the site's stylesheets.
Pick colors that already exist in the dining room: the walls, the tableware, the logo. The palette generated here is reused by category navigation, the contact dock and the PDF menus, so changing it later is a site-wide change rather than a local one.
Step 4 — Design & tools
For each menu type enabled in step 2, choose how its public archive is laid out.
Item menus — à la carte, breakfast, desserts, bar menu, wine list, cocktails, beverages — offer:
- Vertical design - Tik Tok style
- Basic style - price list
- Horizontal carousel
- Masonry
- Swipe - Tinder style
Tasting menus and set menus offer their own two options instead, Menu design 1 and Menu design 2, because a multi-course menu is not an item grid.
Below the layouts, choose the Home template:
- Home: simple design (only links to the menus) — a compact front page whose job is to send guests to the right menu.
- Home: local SEO optimized design — a fuller landing page with sections for the concept, gallery, location and contact details, ready to be edited.
Save and Finish then generates the stylesheets, scripts, archive templates and feed templates for the chosen layouts, creates the item fields each menu type uses, applies the home template to the front page, prepares the content types for translation when a translation layer is present, and marks setup as complete. The warning notice disappears.
The home template fills the front page with placeholder text and stock sections. Treat it as scaffolding to edit, not as finished copy.
Verify the result
- Confirm the setup notice is gone.
- Check that the sidebar now lists one menu for each selected menu type.
- Open Settings → Restaurant settings → Content settings → Content types and confirm every intended type is marked as active.
- Visit the public site while signed out and confirm the site title, logo and colors are the ones you chose.
- Open the front page and confirm the home template was applied.
Restarting the assistant
Settings → Restaurant settings → Restaurant setup → Restaurant settings shows Setup assistant has been completed with a Restart Setup Assistant button. Restarting lets you walk through the steps again, but understand what it does and does not do:
- It does not delete menu types, categories or items that already exist.
- Re-saving step 3 overwrites the color palette and button styles.
- Re-saving step 4 regenerates layout assets and re-applies the chosen home template to the front page, replacing content you may have edited there.
Restart only when you intend those overwrites. For routine changes, use the individual settings screens instead: menu types under Content types, appearance and archive options under Content settings, and optional features under Enabled tools.
Next, complete the restaurant's legal and contact details in Configure your restaurant information.