Phoca Forum

Hi,

I have the Phoca Gallery component on my sites and it's excellent!! I really like Phoca Gallery. I noticed you have this Phoca Menu component also. I like the demo but I have a question. I don't install extensions on my sites unless they are an important requirement for what I need. That way I minimize bugs/conflicts in my software by not installing a lot of extensions.

What are the main benefits of using the Phoca Menu component instead of using the default Joomla article features? For example, it seems like the left sidebar menu items could be done the same way with a Joomla module next to the article content? If there are some features and benefits of Phoca Menu that users find very useful, then please let me know and I might use it on my sites also. What other type of businesses (other than restaurants) also use the Phoca Menu component?

Thanks for any advice!

Hi, this component was based on needs of restaurant managers.

The main purpose was:
- the output should be unique and not broken by actions like copy/paste from word or excel

Restaurant managers just need so the people who add e.g. every day the menu to the system will not "play" with design issues - like you paste a text from word and then you play whole day with formatting because the tabs/tables/hidden formatting/etc. completely destroy the output

In fact you a add pure text (in normall add or multiple add). so it is not possible to break the output.

When you add the menu, you get immediately different formats:

1) HTML - ouput on the website
2) EMAIL - with one button you can send email to the customers
3) PDF - which is mostly used for printing the menu
4) PRINTABLE VERSION (without HTML styles) - when someone does not use PDF, he/she can use this version for printing the menu
5) RSS ouput - such can be used e.g. for Facebook, Twitter, etc. There are services which read the RSS and paste it to the social networks

And there are a lot of different procedures like you work with the component.

- some restaurant managers write the menu every day/week newly in multiple edit view (you see whole day or week and you can add/edit/publish/unpublish/etc. items there
- some store the items and for each day/week/... they publish/unpublish the items.

So as restaurant manager I don't care if somebody broke the design output, I don't care if somebody can design the menu items in editor, I don't care if somebody is able to copy/paste items to email and send them as they can be sent with one click, the same for PDF or printable version and I don't lose my time with adding the menus to the social websites like Facebook or Twitter is.

Etc. and of course the Lite version you can free download and test and really check if this way is better for you or not.

Jan