Phoca provides all the tools you need to create a restaurant website. It all starts with Joomla! - content management system for creating websites. Joomla! has one of the most sophisticated systems allowing easy extension of the entire system. With help of extensions, you can build any type of website. There is a large number of Phoca extensions which extend Joomla! system. Following extensions are the most important extensions for creating a website for restaurants:
Phoca Restaurant Menu
Phoca Restaurant Menu makes it easy to create menus for restaurants, cafes, fast food, school canteens, buffets, bars, clubs, wine shops. Main features are:
- Creating different menus (eight types of menus)
- Displaying menus on website in different formats (HTML, PDF, Text, XML)
- Sending menus in emails
- Printing menus
- Publishing menus on social media website through RSS or screenshots
- Export or import of menus
Phoca PDF
Phoca PDF produces online PDF documents, so each Phoca Restaurant Menu menu can be rendered as PDF with help of Phoca PDF and its restaurant plugin.
Phoca Cart
If you are interested in providing ordering options for your menus rather than displaying them, then the Phoca Cart component is ready for this purpose. Phoca Cart is powerful e-commerce platform which provides users with countless tools for online and offline sales of physical and digital products.
Phoca POS
Phoca POS is a part of Phoca Cart component. It is a point of sale system ready for waiters and restaurant managers.
Phoca Gallery
Phoca Gallery is popular image gallery system which allows users to display images or YouTube videos on websites in many different forms. Images are one of the most important part of your website. All of them can be easily managed by Phoca Gallery and displayed by many different ways on your website.
These are the important extensions when creating websites for restaurants. But there are many other necessary extensions:
Phoca Open Graph plugins
Phoca Open Graph content plugin and Phoca Open Graph system plugin display open graph data of your articles or another content on your site.
Phoca Prticles module
Phoca Particles module displays different HTML parts on your site. The main advantage is simplicity of their creation.
Phoca Photo
Phoca Photo provides an alternative way to display images on your site.
Phoca Maps
Display location of your restaurant to your customers on a map with help of Phoca Maps.
Phoca Email
Phoca Email allows you to display newsletter feature on your site.
Are you planning to launch an e-Commerce website on Joomla and looking for the best premium template for your web store? Then look no further. Our friends at JoomForest have a JF Sirena - a premium class advanced Joomla template powered by Phoca Cart, with lots of special and unique features that will amaze your website visitors.
Sirena is a multipurpose Joomla template based on Gantry 5 framework, with lots of premium features and elements, such as 22 pre-made pages, responsive, more than 48 typography elements, advanced mega menu, smooth animation, unique sections, and positions, etc. The more details you can find on their website. Right now here we will focus on unique and special features that template has for Phoca Cart.
Beautiful Panel for 'Products Cart'
Sirena comes with a beautiful Right Panel position section, where you can publish any module, including our Products Cart module. Its unique expandable animation will take your website to the next level in eyes of your customers.
Beautiful Panel for 'Products Search'
Sirena has another beautiful Search Panel position section, where you can show our Phoca Cart Products Search module, which also comes with unique stylish expandable animation.
Beautiful Panel for 'Products Filter'
Sirena has a unique module layout for the Products Filter module, in module manager you can simply choose the specific layout and it will show up the same way as you see on the screenshot.
Products Zoom & Image Lightbox
By default, our Phoca Cart has its own addon - Image Zoom plugin, which you need to install as a plugin in addition, also by default Phoca Cart has its own core system image lightbox. But JoomForest added in Sirena more advanced inbuilt lightbox and photo zoom effect on product items, so it doesn't require to use of our plugin. You can find out more details on the live demo.
Special layouts for 'Currency', 'Wish List' & 'Compare' modules
Also, Sirena comes with its own stylish layouts for our Currency, Wish List and Compare Phoca Cart modules.
Unique layout for 'Sales Countdown'
It is very eye-catching the unique layout for the Phoca Cart Sales Countdown Timer module.
Light, Dark and Vertical layout for 'Product Scroller'
Sirena has three different layout styles for our Product Scroller module. One of them is the Light version which you see above on the screenshot.
The 2-nd layout style is the Dark version of it, which can be used for darker sections of the site.
The 3-rd one is the Vertical styling, with smaller product image thumbnails, which can be used to show, for example, some popular products in smaller parts of the site.
Pre-Built e-Commerce pages
Sirena comes with more than 6 ready-made shop demo pages, using their Quickstart package you can quickly build an e-commerce website you need.
We are happy to share you with an exclusive 25% discount (valid until November 15, 2020) on Sirena subscription plans:
If you’re looking for an awesome design for your next online store, Sirena is the best choice to start with. JoomForest provides professional Joomla templates and services for more than 9 years, and they provide high-quality support services for their premium templates.
The most problematic part when updating components in Joomla! CMS is the update of the database tables and their columns.
Extensions (components) do not install themselves in Joomla! CMS. They are installed by Joomla! extension manager which uses SQL update files to update table columns in database.
It sometimes happens that the update is not performed correctly, because the SQL file tries to add a column to the database table that already exists there. Unfortunately, there is no workable method to determine if a column already exists inside static SQL file and the installation ends with an error.
Commands like: ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN ... end with error in case that the required column already exists in the database. This is valid for MySQL database, not for MariaDB database. In MariaDB database, you can use ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN IF NOT EXISTS ... This command would solve all problems. But the problem is, there is no difference between MySQL and MariaDB driver in Joomla! CMS. So we cannot use this MariaDB command because it will throw an error in MySQL database.
In short: all problems with updating columns would be solved by the "IF NOT EXISTS" command part, which does not exist for one database, and where it exists, it cannot be used because it would cause an error in another database.
So, if you get following screen when installing component, mostly the update SQL file needs to be found and the SQL command needs to be commented or removed manually.
This action should be done mostly by advanced users who have the knowledge to search in files and edit them:
1) SQL update files can be found in ZIP installation package, for example in Phoca Cart installation package, you can find them in following folder:
- ZIP: admin/update/sql/mysql
2) Unzip the installation ZIP package, go to the above mentioned folder and search in files for the column name which was displayed in error message.
3) Open the file where this column name occurs and comment the whole SQL command (starting with ALTER TABLE ...) or delete it (Comments in SQL files are set per double dashes (--))
For example FROM:
ALTER TABLE `#__phocacart_product_stock` ADD COLUMN `sku` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '';
ALTER TABLE `#__phocacart_product_stock` ADD COLUMN `ean` varchar(15) NOT NULL DEFAULT '';
TO:
-- ALTER TABLE `#__phocacart_product_stock` ADD COLUMN `sku` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '';
-- ALTER TABLE `#__phocacart_product_stock` ADD COLUMN `ean` varchar(15) NOT NULL DEFAULT '';
4) ZIP the installation package back (including newly edited files) and try to install the component again.
Phoca Cart 3.5.4
If you get the problem when updating Phoca Cart to version 3.5.4 and the problematic column is "sku" or "ean", you can try to install prepared package where the SQL commands were commented. There is no need to do manual changes described above. The package is ready to install (it does not include the SQL queries which are problematic).
Download alternative Phoca Cart version 3.5.4 and install it in Joomla! extension manager.
There are two major reasons why future versions of Phoca Gallery will change significantly:
1) Joomla! 4
2) Output modernization
Joomla! 4
All Phoca extensions are written directly for Joomla! CMS and if the Joomla! CMS changes, the extensions must also change. Therefore, Phoca Gallery is gradually being rewritten so that it would work in Joomla! 4.
Output modernization
Unfortunately, it is not possible to do design output changes in minor versions because of backward compatibility and override features. Such changes must be made in major versions. Therefore, it sometimes takes longer to implement a modern look. Such a change is now planned.
So now there will be three directions instead of two directions, if we are talking about the development of Phoca gallery:
1) Phoca Gallery 4.4.0 - it includes minimum design changes. This version is intended for existing users and the existing Joomla! 3.9 version.
2) Phoca Gallery 4.5.0 - in this version, support for responsive display will be extended. This means that most non-responsive popup libraries and all that are built on the Mootools library will be removed. Parameters which can be moved to CSS will be also removed. Float box based output will be changed to Flexbox based output. HTML output will be simplified. This version of Phoca Gallery will be designed primarily for Joomla! 4.
3) Phoca Photo 4.0.0 - Phoca Photo is a Bootstrap responsive alternative for Phoca Gallery. Just like in Joomla! 3, Phoca Photo will add the ability to view Phoca Gallery output using the Bootstrap library in Joomla! 4.
Phoca Gallery version 4.4.0 Beta can be tested now. Be aware, it is a development version and should be used for testing only. Download it on Phoca Gallery download page.
Phoca Cart is a part of Joomla! system. Such robust system can negatively affect audits on your site. For example audits made by Lighthouse Audits. Joomla! system is composed of many parts like templates, modules, plugins, components, etc. Such parts can load a lot of libraries, some of them can be obsolete and all this can have negative impact on audit results.
See example: Joomla! Templates Directory
This website has the following audit results:
- Accessibility: 100%
- Best Practices: 100%
- SEO: 100%
HTML output of Phoca Cart tries to follow audit advices regarding accessibility, best practices and SEO. But in order to achieve such good results, it is necessary to install Phoca Upgrade System plugin, which will help us manage loading of some problematic Javascript libraries.
Following parameters can be set in this plugin:
Remove Obsolete Bootstrap Javascript - removes the old version of Bootstrap Javascript, for example, if your template is loading modern Bootstrap version (version 3 or 4), you can remove version 2 (which is a part of Joomla! 3.x) with this plugin.
Remove Mootools Javascript - removes the Mootools library because it also loads occasionally in Joomla! system
Remove jQuery Migrate Javascript - removes jQuery Migrate library - this is useful if you use the Enable New jQuery Version parameter
Enable New jQuery Version - replaces the outdated jQuery library used in Joomla! for newest version
Remove Front Editing Javascript - if you are not using frontend editing, you can also remove this library.
Of course, you have to check the Javascript console, because some extensions, for example, may not be able to work with the latest jQuery version. But if you have an extension that can work with it, modern jQuery means extra points in the audit because the outdated jQuery library loaded in Joomla! subtracts some points from the audit. All this is important if your website emphasizes accessibility, best practices and SEO.
Main function of Phoca Upgrade System plugin is replacing obsolete Bootstrap 2 code with newest Bootstrap code. This is helpful when your template uses Bootstrap 3 or 4 for rendering HTML output but Joomla! 3.x output is still rendered with obsolete Bootstrap 2 library.