• Added @ to disable warnings for trim function on Menu card admin pages on certain installs
• Fixed delivery hours and added capability to stay open past midnight
• Updated jQuery Cycle to 2.99

If you experienced any of the above errors, please update to the latest version.

Installation and setup of MyRestaurantTheme takes about 2 hours, so unfortunately we can’t do this for free for non-recurring customers.

If you would like us to install MyRestaurantTheme on your own server, you have 2 options:

Option 1.

Pay a 1 time fee of $76 for this service.

Please send us your cPanel login details and your domain name after completing your purchase through the button below.

If you are using our hosted restaurant website solution, and would like to install an SSL certificate onto your domain, there are several things you need to know and carry out.

1. Dedicated IP

Secure connections require a dedicated IP address. We can provide you with a dedicated IP for $3 per month, amounting to $36 per year. This must be paid upfront, since SSL certificates are also issued on an annual basis.

Once we assign your dedicated IP to your website, your PC might show that your site is not reachable, since it remembers the old IP address. You can flush your PCs DNS cache to fix this, here is how. Furthermore, worldwide propagation of the new DNS will take anywhere from 0 to 8 hours, during which time your site will appear to be down for some users.

2. Purchasing an SSL certificate

Once you have your dedicated IP address, we can commence with purchasing an SSL certificate. You can do this yourself from any 3rd party SSL certificate issuer, or we can do it for you.

Either way, please download and fill out this form, and send it to us via email.

If you commission us to obtain an SSL for you

If you don’t want to deal with searching for and purchasing an SSL, we can do it for you for $63 per year.

If you purchase an SSL from a 3rd party

If you decide to purchase an SSL certificate on your own, please follow the steps outlined below.

1. Once you fill out the above form and send it to us, we will email you a CSR and RSA Key. You will need them to purchase your SSL, so make sure you don’t delete the letter.
2. Purchase your SSL Certificate and send the certificate issuer the CSR we sent you in the first step.
3. Your chosen SSL issuer will generate and return an SSL Certificate as well as an SSL CA Certificate (Trusted Authority) (sometimes called a “CA Bundle”). These two pieces of information will be encrypted text documents. Typically they will be provided via email as compressed (zipped) attachments.
4. Send us the SSL certificate and the SSL CA certificate via email.  you are ready to fill out the SSL installation form. When you received the results for your CSR form, we provided you with the RSA Private Key to submit on the installation form. When you complete filling out this form, click on Submit to complete your request.

3. Installation of the SSL certificate

Once you carry out all of the above, we will go ahead and install your SSL certificate on your domain, and inform you when everything is ready.

Purchase options

Now that you are familiar with what is required to setup an SSL, please choose what you would like us to do:

Once your payment goes through and we receive the form mentioned in step 2, we will start working on setting up your SSL connection.

The above is for a 1 year SSL certificate. If you would like to purchase more years in advance, please contact us for pricing.

You might notice that we jumped over v2.2 in the public set of releases, this is because as we were about to release v2.2, WordPress upgraded to v3.5, which caused a lot of problems. Since v2.2 was a ready release, we thought it best to jump to v2.3.

V2.3 is a major release due to the changes required by WordPress 3.5, so we would recommend updating all theme files.

Beside the bug and compatibility fixes, we’ve also added several new features as requested by our customers, making our restaurant website solution even better and more intuitive than before. Please go to your members area to download the update, and read the details of the changes in the changelog file. Remember to look at the changes for both v2.2 and v2.3, since 2.2 was not a public release.

A popular affiliate tactic of generating traffic to their website is to advertise themselves as offering My Restaurant Theme coupon or discount codes, since lots of people search for these terms in Google. These sites are deceiving, since once the page gets visited, you’ll notice that there are no coupon codes for MyRestaurantTheme.

We have not given out any coupon codes, and we are not planning on doing this in the future either.

Providing discount codes is not in our marketing strategy, we’d rather give the discount to everyone, not just a select few who find out about the code. The current discounts can be seen on our purchase page, and these discounts are available to everyone purchasing our product.

Again, we do not have any discount codes available, and we are sorry about the affiliates that advertise this. We will remove them from our affiliate program as we encounter them.

The study was conducted in February 2012 via online (1,064) and telephone (425) surveys, sampling adults living in private households in the USA. You can download the full study here, including how restaurants use online marketing techniques.

After analyzing the results of the study, we found some really useful statistics that provide insight into the workings of the consumer, which we’d like to summarize below:

Online marketing in general

• Consumers view restaurants that use online marketing as modern and popular.

Marketing message

Social media

• Customers consider social media their personal space, so restaurants need to avoid annoying hard-sells. Keep your social media tone informative and casual.

As you know, the online ordering system of a MyRestaurantTheme powered website will send an automatic email to the restaurant when an order is placed, or a table is reserved. It can be daunting, and not very efficient for a restaurant to keep on checking their email for these notifications, there are several things you can do to make things more efficient:

• Print the emails automatically: With most email clients, you can create rules to take certain automatic actions with incoming emails. One of them is printing a letter automatically, when it has a certain subject line, is received from a certain email address, etc.
  Setting such a rule for MyRestaurantTheme notification letters would mean the staff won’t have to constantly look at their email, the printer is much more noticeable.
  An effective way of using this method is to use HP e-printers. These printers are PC independent, they have a unique printer designated email address, and if you send an email to the printer, it will automatically be printed. Since e-printers are PC independent, you can simply place them wherever your staff takes orders, so they will always see the printouts. A great feature is the ability to allow letters from only specific email addresses to be accepted, to eliminate and junk mail or spam. HP e-printers start at $60, making them a cost efficient way to receive order/reservation notifications.
• Sending a fax: There are 3rd party email-to-fax service providers, who will send a designated fax number a fax of an email they receive.
  Essentially, this means that you set the notification email to be sent to the 3rd party service provider, and they send you a fax with the contents of the email.
  This method is similar to the automatic printing method in essence, since the end result is a physical piece of paper, but since such service providers charge a monthly service fee of $8-$15, the automatic printing method would be preferred.
• Sending an SMS: As with the email-to-fax option, there are 3rd party providers that send out an SMS of incoming email.
• POS integration: Some POS system installed in restaurants have the capability to connect to the internet, or can be modified to do so. If the POS supports it, you can actually create orders withing the POS through incoming data. Most POS systems that accept external input require XML data of the order, which is relatively easy to integrate into MyRestaurantTheme.
  This requires a programmer and testing with the given POS. Once we have enough feedback on such integrations, we might post plugins that we know work with given POS systems.

These are your options for the notification of the restaurant of online orders and table reservations, we hope you find it useful.

If you are using any given email-to-fax provider and are satisfied with their services, please feel free to post a link to them in the comment section below, stating what country they service, and their fee in the local currency.

This basically involves migrating a WordPress installation from one server to another, albeit it’s a little simpler than a standard production site would be, since you don’t need to worry about any plugins or more advanced settings/customization.

We’re making the files and database of our demo sites available for anyone to use. You can download them below, please follow the instructions below on where and how to use them:

• wp-uploads folder (zip file) >>
• database >> (right mouse button -> Save file as)

Please download the above files, and follow the below instructions to install everything.

1. Install WP as you normally would, as well as all of the standard MyRestaurantTheme files, making sure you have the most up-to-date version.
   Do not install or activate any WP plugins, we need a clean WP installation.
2. Via FTP or any server file editing program, delete your existing site’s wp-uploads folder, and upload the one we gave you above. The download is a zip file, you’ll need to uncompress it on your server (or on your PC and upload each file and directory, but uncompressing on the server through cPanel is more efficient)
   
3. Open the downloaded database file in a text editor of your choice (for example Notepad++), and do a search and replace as follows, where it’ll replace around 600 hits for you. This step overwrite all the instances of the URL of our demo site in the WP database with that of your own site:
   • Search: http://myrestauranttheme.com/demo/classic
   • Replace with your site URL, make sure you DON’T have a trailing slash at the end of your url
4. Via phpMyAdmin, go to your existing site’s database, press the Check All link, and drop your existing tables.
   
5. Now press the import button, and import the database you modified in step 2.
6.  Go to your site’s wp-admin in any browser, and log in with the following credentials.
   • Username: admin
   • Password: abc123
7. Your original site admin details have been changed with the import of our sample database, so after loging in, you’ll want to change your password, as well as the site admin email address.
8. In your dashboard, go to settings -> permalinks, and press save to rebuild your permalink structure.
9. In your dashboard, go to Myrestaurant ->MyRestaurant settings, and press save to rebuild the CSS of your site.
10. You’re pretty much finished, you can now start making the site your own. You’ll want to go over all of the settings, phone numbers, etc., as well us upload your own logo, modify the color scheme, and start creating food items.

And that should do it, if you have any issues, please feel free to ask in our support forum.

Please take some time to study the graphic, as well as read the written study analysis, as it provides new proof on the importance of mobile optimization of restaurant websites, with the main takeaways being:

• 90% of smartphone and tablet users are looking to make a purchase within the day, wow!!!
• 30% of smartphone users convert immediately, and 60% within an hour.
• Location is key for smartphone users, making the local search marketing efforts of your restaurant all the more important.
• Online reviews are increasingly important in getting new customers through your door (so you might want to read our articles on how to get online reviews for your restaurant, and http://www.myrestauranttheme.com/restaurant-website-marketing/handling-negative-restaurant-reviews-and-how-to-find-them/).

Here is the infographic:

If you’re not updating by overwriting the entire myrestaurant directory, please make sure you copy each changed file from the changelog.txt, otherwise your site may not function correctly.

New features:

• If only 1 payment option selected, skip Choose Payment Method step
• Shipping option only checks for address/city/zip if home delivery option is selected, no check for takeaway
• Ability to add unique variations, so users are limited to choosing just 1 variant from a variation category

Bug fixes:

• Reservation hours fix if closed
• Delivery hours fix
• Menu card pagination fix – only menu cards with one food category are paged
• Homepage close button z-index fix
• Sidebar fix on shopping cart pages