Online Meal Reservations & Payment
From: Sharon Villines (sharonsharonvillines.com)
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2015 12:40:32 -0700 (PDT)
Finally. I found an easy shopping cart for announcing meals, signing up, and 
paying. The bugs in my set up aren’t worked out yet but it works.

It uses Wordpress and Paypal. One of the reasons I think we should use standard 
software is that it is easily learned (74,652,825 websites) and is thus 
completely under the control of the community and can easily be modified. 18.9% 
of all websites use Wordpress. Paypal is incredibly easy to use and common.

The shopping cart plugin is WP Paypal Shopping Cart Options. I think it can be 
used without the paypal connection but I haven’t tried it.

There is a sample wordpress post showing a meal announcement and shopping cart 
a the link below. The community lists the items so there could be many cost 
variations and options. Monthly or annual fees, for example. And discounts. And 
even non-meal items.

http://www.takomavillage.org/testing/meal-announcement-monday-1272015/

I linked it to my PayPal account for testing but there are other settings so 
people do NOT have to have a paypal account to pay for meals. Paypal’s new 
mobile interface is very opaque and I can’t find my merchant account that even 
takes credit cards and produces an invoice with purchase details.

The meal announcements can be posted via email by cook teams. The template is 
at the bottom of this message.

Confirmation of reservations are sent to the person making the reservations and 
to a standard meal person. Haven’t figured out how to get these sent to the 
person who announced the meal.

The meal announcement is a blog post and follows the same formatting as your 
other posts. You can also have a custom post type just for meal reservations. 

The plug in also has a premium version for a one-time payment of $49.

There is a page listing all the reservations (items purchased).

Please check this out and offer your own tips for using it. Even if your 
primary site is not on wordpress, you can add a wordpress installation in a 
different directory. I don’t think you can use plugins on the free wordpress 
hosted sites. 

Sharon.


--------------

Email subject line: Meal Announcement: [Enter Meal Name, Day, Date —Time]

Body of email 

Menu:

[Enter Menu]

[Enter any other information]

[show_wp_shopping_cart]

You can change amounts in the shopping cart. If your cook team discount only 
applies to one meal, please enter them in a separate shopping cart.

<strong>Please remember the amount in your shopping cart. It doesn't transfer 
to the current Paypal Payment Page.</strong>

<strong><a href="https://www.paypal.me/sharonv";>Check out using 
PayPal</a></strong>

If you do not pay for meals but need to make a reservation, please email the 
cook directly.
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