I am thrilled to announce the release of Core CMS v0.6.3! This update marks the completion of our Phase 7.2 expansion, transforming the platform from a standard CMS into a fully capable Food & Beverage Point-of-Sale ecosystem.
Major Highlights / Updates
This release is packed with tools designed specifically for restaurant and cafe operations:
- Digital QR Menus: A mobile-first destination (`/menu`) featuring category tabs, rich item cards, modifier chips, and a seamless cart checkout flow.
- Kanban Kitchen Dashboard: An auto-reloading admin board (`admin/fnb-orders.php`) with 6 status columns, audio chimes for new tickets, and a thermal-printer-ready print style.
- Dual Payment Mode: Native support for both "At Table" server-processed cash/card payments and full online Stripe Checkout integration.
- Delivery Zones & Locations: Manage multi-area dining (e.g., Patio vs. Inside) and enforce live address-based zone eligibility for deliveries.
Technical Deep Dive
Under the hood, we've focused heavily on performance and reliability for high-traffic environments:
- Live Kitchen Polling: Customer order tickets (`#K-XXXX`) automatically poll the kitchen status via `/api/fnb-status` every 15 seconds without overloading the server.
- Zero Residue Schema: All F&B features use prefixed tables (`fnb_orders`, `fnb_locations`, etc.) and can be cleanly purged on uninstall to maintain our lightweight vision.
- QR Generator Engine: Swapped deprecated Google Charts for the QuickChart API, ensuring instantaneous, high-res, table-specific QR code generation without external tracking bloat.
Looking Ahead
With the e-commerce and F&B ecosystem now firmly established, our next frontier is Ecosystem Integration (Phase 8), preparing the foundation to seamlessly power the dragriver.ca and brainav.ca architectures on this unified stack.
Try the new system out at core-cms.brainav.ca.
Until next time!
— Jason Brain