Create categories

Categories are the sections of a menu. They decide how a guest navigates, what the category navigation shows, and how the printed PDF is grouped — so they are worth designing before the items are entered.

Where they live

Every menu type has its own All categories screen, reached from its sidebar entry. The heading reads Your categories with a count.

Categories are never shared between menu types. The à la carte menu's Starters and the breakfast menu's Starters are two different categories.

Create one

1. Open All categories under the menu type.
2. Type the name into New category name….
3. Select Add new.
4. Repeat for each section.
5. Arrange them and select Save changes.

The screen asks you to save pending changes before adding or deleting another category, so save as you go rather than staging a large restructure and a new category at once.

Design the sections first

Write the sections on paper before typing them. A menu with the right sections needs no clever ordering; a menu with the wrong ones cannot be rescued by it.

Guidelines that hold across restaurant types:

• Between three and eight sections per menu. Fewer reads as a list, more reads as a catalogue.
• Name them the way guests speak, not the way the kitchen is organized.
• Every section must be able to hold at least three items. A section with one dish is a dish, not a section.
• Do not encode price or preparation in the name unless guests choose that way.

Nesting

Fenómenus supports one level of nesting: parents and their children, and nothing deeper.

Use a child category when a section genuinely splits in the guest's mind:

Wines
    Whites
    Reds
Grill
    Beef
    Fish

Do not use nesting to rebuild an internal taxonomy. If you find yourself wanting a third level, the menu is being modelled rather than written.

Descriptions

A category can carry a description. Use it where the section name is not self-explanatory — a wine family, a regional group, a tasting sequence — and leave it empty elsewhere. The seeded wine categories arrive with descriptions of exactly this kind.

Order

The order on this screen is the order guests read. Arrange the sections in service order — what is ordered first at the top — rather than alphabetically. See Reorder categories.

The automatically created category

If an item is published when the menu type has no categories at all, Fenómenus creates one named after the menu type and files the item there. If you see a category with the same name as the menu itself, that is where it came from: rename it to something real, or move its items into proper sections and remove it.

After creating the sections

1. Confirm the tree and the order are saved — the screen shows You have unsaved changes until they are.
2. Add the items and assign each one.
3. Check the public category navigation signed out, on a phone.
4. On a multilingual site, translate the category names; translating the items does not translate their sections.