Nova Menu

This is the guide for the Pixelgrade Nova Menu component. We will tackle both behaviour and technical details.

What Does It Do?

It is a very straight forward component: it activates support for Jetpack Food Menus (the code name is Nova-Menu) and provides a shortcode for outputting those food menus in pages.

What It Doesn’t Do?

This is a functional component meaning it will NOT provide theme sections like a hero or footer does.

It doesn’t hold any template parts, WP admin or frontend CSS or JS. Just the functional code and SCSS to include in the theme’s SCSS.

How It Works?

The component activates support for Food Menus found in Jetpack (it’s a hidden custom post type – it can’t be controlled via Jetpack’s settings). With this customers can easily manage their food menus.

The menu items are organized in sections (like Breakfast or Lunch – you can think of them as categories) and each can have various labels (like spicy, hot, vegan – you can think of them as tags).

Each menu item has some content, a price, featured image, and an optional excerpt (if empty it will be automatically generated from the content via the_excerpt()).

Now to output those menus in pages, we need some shortcodes. The component adds the [nova_menu]shortcode as the main shortcode, but it also adds two more shortcodes that function exactly the same: [jetpack_nova_menu] for future compatibility and [restaurant_menu] for those that prefer this route. We will use [nova_menu] throughout this guide.

The shortcode supports the following attributes:

  • display_sections (by default it’s false) controls whether to display the section title and description before the menu items in that section;
  • display_labels (by default it’s true) controls whether to display the labels of each menu item;
  • display_content (by default it’s true) controls whether to display the excerpt (true), the full menu item content (full), or no menu item description (false);
  • link_items (by default it’s false) controls whether to link each menu item to its single view, for more details;
  • featured_label (by default it’s featured) controls which label(s) to use to highlight certain menu items – they will be given the .highlighted class; you can specify a single label or a comma separated list;
  • style (by default it’s regular) controls the style of the shortcode: regular or dotted;
  • include_section (by default it’s false) controls what menu items to display based on section; if empty or false we will display all menu items regardless of section; if given a comma separated list of section slugs (like breakfast, petit-dejeuner, lunch), only menu items from those sections will be displayed;
  • include_label (by default it’s false) controls what menu items to display based on label; if empty or false we will display all menu items regardless of label; if given a comma separated list of label slugs (like vegan, hot-like-you, stop-drooling), only menu items with those labels will be displayed;
  • showposts (by default it’s -1) controls how many menu items to display; if -1 we will show all of them, otherwise the integer number specified;
  • order (by default it’s asc) controls the order of the menu items; asc or ASC for ascending order, desc or DESC for descending order;
  • orderby (by default it’s date) controls the ordering parameter; we only allow date, title and rand for random order;

Regarding the highlighting of certain menu items, there is one more detail to know, besides specifying the featured label or labels: if we will find a portion of the menu item’s title wrapped in parentheses ((Try this) Pork...) or square brackets ([Chef's choice] Bulion...), we will extract that and use as the highlight title.

That’s it. You can use multiple shortcodes on the same page, put them into columns using Gridable, put a shortcode with each menu section on separate pages and use our Multipage component, you are in charge.

Important Technical Details

All customizations done by a theme to a component should reside in the /inc/components.php file, regardless if there are dedicated files for certain integrations (Customify comes to mind). This ensures that one can identify quickly the way a theme interacts with components.

You can control the tags used in the shortcode markup by filtering the default array given to the pixelgrade_nova_menu_shortcode_menu_item_loop_markup filter, something like this:

$default_menu_item_loop_markup = array(
		'menu_tag'               => 'section',
		'menu_class'             => 'menu-list__section',
		'menu_header_tag'        => 'header',
		'menu_header_class'      => 'menu-group__header',
		'menu_title_tag'         => 'h4',
		'menu_title_class'       => 'menu-group__title underlined',
		'menu_description_tag'   => 'div',
		'menu_description_class' => 'menu-group__description',
	);

You can also change the classes added to individual menu items using the pixelgrade_nova_menu-menu-item-post-class filter.

One last filter is the jetpack_nova_menu_thumbnail_size that allows you to specify a different thumbnail size to use for the menu items featured image; by default we use small. Do note that the component doesn’t register any thumbnail sizes via add_image_size(). That is up to the theme to do.