We recently had the opportunity to help build a great new website for our friends at Belltown Billiards. Aside from a wonderful design completed by our team, we built a comprehensive CMS solution with aid of the Drupal Content Mangement Framework. Virtually every piece of the website is configurable by the client, making site edits a breeze.

As I approach over a decade of working in the online world, I’m amazed at how far technology has come in the last few years. Thanks to inroads made by the Open Source movement, technology which was once reserved for enterprise-class companies is now freely available to the public. In this post I’d like to show off one of the cooler features of the website: its ability to easily manage restaurant menus.

Restaurant Menu Customization

One of our client’s feature requests was to have a self managed restaurant menu system which could be easily updated by employees. While the Drupal community provides a number of great modules which allow site builders to quickly configure content, nothing out there quite fit our needs for displaying menu content.

Our development challenge was to create a solution which leveraged Drupal’s excellent content management bits, with a fluid design which made an online restaurant menu seem not so, erm, boring. Additionally, everything would be for nothing if the administrator interface was too complicated to be updated by an employee.

Our solution combined a powerful admin interface which used our own custom software in the backend to help display menu information easily.

We’ve been extremely pleased with the flexibility provided by Drupal and other similar open source platforms like WordPress. As open source technology continues to progress, it’s clear that many smaller companies and brands can take advantage of technology that for reasons of price or complexity simply wasn’t available just several years ago.