Quick Start

Three steps take a fresh install to a restaurant that can take an order. Everything else — kitchen routing, reservations, terminals, delivery zones — builds on top of what you set up here.

Open Components → Next Restaurant to begin.

Step 1 — Create your location

Almost everything in Next Restaurant hangs off a location, so create one before anything else.

Go to Locations → New and fill in:

• Name and contact details — what guests see on the storefront and on receipts.
• Opening hours — per day, with the option of split shifts (lunch and dinner as separate windows). The reservation availability engine and the ordering pages both read these, so a mistake here shows up as missing booking slots later.
• Currency, tax rate and service charge — used for every price the system calculates. Currency formatting itself (symbol position, decimal places) is under Settings → Currency.
• Timezone — orders, bookings and shift times are all stamped against it.

Save. If you run more than one venue, add the rest now — menu pricing, stock, staff and terminals can all be scoped per location afterwards.

Step 2 — Build the menu

Go to Menu Categories first and create the sections your menu is organised into — Starters, Mains, Desserts, Drinks. Categories control the order things appear in on the public menu, so set their ordering while you're there.

Then go to Menu → New for each dish:

• Name, description, price and category — the minimum to make an item sellable.
• Image — upload and crop it in place. Menu photography is the single biggest lever on the storefront, so it's worth doing properly.
• Allergens and dietary tags — set up your allergen list under Menu → Allergens first if you haven't; tags surface on the public menu and on the kitchen ticket.
• Modifier groups — create reusable option sets under Menu → Modifier Groups (sizes, extras, cooking preferences, with min/max rules and price deltas) and attach them to the items that need them.

You do not need the whole menu to continue — three or four items are enough to test the flow end to end.

Step 3 — Publish the storefront and take a test order

Create the public pages as Joomla menu items: Menus → (your menu) → Add New Menu Item, choose Next Restaurant → Menu for the menu showcase and Next Restaurant → Order for online ordering. Save both, then visit them on the site.

Now place a test order from the storefront and watch it move:

1. Add an item to the cart on the Order page and check out. Set the order to pickup so no delivery zone is required.
2. In the admin, open Orders — the order is there, with its channel marked as online.
3. Open Kitchen — the ticket is on the board, routed to whichever station your rules send it to (everything goes to the default station until you configure routing).
4. Open POS, find the check, and settle it with cash.

That round trip exercises the whole pipeline: storefront → order record → kitchen display → payment → ledger.

What Happens Next

You now have a working restaurant. What you configure next depends on how you actually operate:

• Taking card payments? Configure PayPal under Payment Gateways. Until you do, only manual settlement types (cash, card terminal, bank transfer, on-account) are available. Stripe, Adyen, Square and SumUp are listed as Coming soon and cannot be enabled in 6.0.0 — for cards in person, Card terminal works alongside a reader you already own.
• Running a kitchen with more than one section? Set up stations and routing rules so lines go to the grill, fry and pass separately. See Kitchen Display.
• Taking bookings? Add tables and areas, draw your floor plan, and publish the booking page. See Reservations and Floor Map.
• Serving guests at tables? Turn on QR ordering, print the per-table codes, and let guests order from their phones. See QR Ordering.
• Putting screens on the floor? Provision staff terminals for POS, kitchen, pickup, waiter, host and clock-in, so staff use them without a Joomla login. See Staff Terminals.
• More than one person using it? Create roles and assign them, so the kitchen sees the kitchen and the manager sees the reports. See Roles & Permissions.
• Not using part of it? Switch modules off under Apps — the nav item disappears and the endpoints refuse the request. See Apps & Modules.

And if you would rather explore with data already in place, turn on Demo Mode: it seeds a fully populated restaurant and puts the component into a read-only tour where nothing you click can change anything.