Our multipurpose Quark theme for Joomla 3 has proven popular with our users, with the extra pages and features like touchscreen-compatible galleries offering a superior starting point for building a unique, flexible website. Now we’re proud to announce our first full restyle to meet a new set of needs; Restaurant.
Restyle your Quark frontpage instantly
Available for download now, Restaurant takes all the great features and intuitive layouts included with the base Quark template and builds on them, reworking their functionality to reach the standards a successful food business needs. You’ll find new frontpage sections covering the two most important areas a good restaurant needs to attract their customers; menu highlights and reservations, so any customers that stumble on to your site can be tempted by your offerings and jump straight into booking before they change their minds! The same useful menu options are available too, so you’ll still be able to pick between the classic and off-canvas menus.
Inform customers with special additional pages
We’ve also reworked our prepared additional pages to match the new aesthetic the Restaurant style uses, so you’ll still be able to take advantage of them to get a smooth-looking contact page or display a gallery of your chef’s creations. In addition, we’ve taken the time to add two dining-specific pages; Reservations, a separate contact-style page that includes additional options covering extra info you’ll need to prepare a booking, such as the required booking time and number of people. The second additional page covers your menu; chances are you know exactly why a menu page might prove useful to a restaurant! This additional page provides an elegant layout to show off what you’ve got to offer.
Beatiful extras for customers new and old
As an extra little bonus on the aesthetic side of things we’re also including a bunch of food-related icons from PixelLove; these icons are minimalist and unobtrusive, but add a tidy bit of style to the overall feel of the page, and help make things more intuitive for readers scanning the page for info.
How does it all work?
So that’s enough about the features that you’ll find in this new style; how does it all work? Well, when we created the Quark template we purposely built the ability for it to use multiple alternative styles into the code; the Restaurant style takes advantage of this ability to force some pretty significant style changes.
All LESS changes are connected with the restaurant.main.less file – this file contains a modified version of the basic main.less file that is the core of making the beautiful changes happen. To start using the Restaurant layout instead of the basic layout, you’ll need to enable usage of the restaurant.main.less file in the template’s basic settings:
The restaurant.main.less file relies on a few style-specific LESS files that are contained in the less/restaurant directory:
- variables.less – This file contains a modified set of variables for the restaurant style
- additional.less – in this file we have added all the LESS code that’s purely for the restaurant style only
- overrides.less – this file contains all LESS overrides for the existing LESS rules (doing it this way protects the original Quark style from being overwritten, so you can switch back at any time).
Other LESS files that this style uses are all taken from the standard less directory.
When you enable use of the restaurant.main.less file, you are also automatically enabling the js/gk.restaurant.js file – this file contains additional JavaScript code dedicated for the restaurant style of the Quark template only.
It may sound a bit complex if you’re not familiar with coding, but all the above steps we’ve taken when preparing Quark allows the additional styles to work as a transparent layer over the basic Quark style, rather than everything being erased and replaced whenever a new style is applied. This makes switching instant, and if you’re also intending to make changes to the code yourself you’ll be able to work on each style individually if necessary.
So there you go; all you need to know about this great new style for restaurants, bars or other dining establishments. Now the only thing left to do is go and download it so you can give it a go, or if you haven’t already, head over to our Quark page to purchase it and get instant access to the original and new layout, as well as all the great updated features we’ve released over the past few weeks!