Skip to main content

Updated Menu Interface

Menu plans, School menus, lifecycle, and navigation

Ghaith Ayadi avatar
Written by Ghaith Ayadi
Updated over 5 months ago

Splitting menu plans and school menus

  • What used to be the general version of a menu is now a standalone navigation item while school menus also get their own navigation item. District directors can see both while school managers can see only “Menus” which shows only the school menus related to their school

  • Better navigation between Menus and Production: Faster navigation starts by knowing where you are both in space and time.

    • The new navbar mentions both at the same time so you don’t have to look at the left navigation bar to know if you’re on a menu plan, a school menu or a production record

    • We also maintain the time axis on navigation. This means that while navigating between schools, PRs, Menus plans, the calendar day never changes, until you explicitly change it. This comes in very handy when working with cycle menus where two weeks can look identical

Lifecycle, publishing status, and health

We are unifying our lifecycle and publishing flows across Gaia, starting with Menus.

  • Menu lifecycle

    • Active: This is for menus currently in use. Visible on navigation and editable

    • Archived: For menus that are no longer relevant. Hidden from navigation, uneditable, but are still accessible (unarchive to view)

    • Deleted: This is a soft delete, meaning that the data is still available on our servers, all references will be kept, but the menu itself can only be seen if restored by our customer support team

  • Menu status

    • Draft: This is for new menus. Drafts are only visible to the person who created them.

    • Published: Visible to schools and on public portal.

    • Revision: A revision is created to save all edits to a published menu. This is equivalent to the current “Edit mode” which we phased out. This will allow us to bring our auto-saving feature to edits on all objects, namely Pantry objects, and orders

    • Outdated: This is equivalent to current “Archived” versions. When a revision is published, the previous version becomes Outdated.

  • Introducing Object Health

    • Think of this as both a contextual notification inbox, an activity log, and a helper section in one. This is in an effort to centralize all information about the object in one area.

    • “Missing weighted analysis” is the first example we have. Expect to see “Recipes updated”, “Offline-unsaved changed” and more health states in the next releases

Transparent publishing states

  • Our changes aim to reveal the states our menu plans and school menus take following republishing events. This release does not change existing behavior and doesn’t add any new functionality. It only aims to make the states of menus more transparent.

    • The weeks of cyclical menu plans are now stated in letters instead of numbers. A two-week cycle has A and B weeks. A 4-week cycle has A, B, C, and D weeks. This is to help you refer to those weeks. For example, it’s easier to say “Publish B weeks” instead of “Publish week 2 of 4”.

    • All “A weeks” of a cycle are identical. If a change is made to a specific A week, that week is called Off-cycle. This means that all future republishing of the A week will not be received by the off-cycle week. The next release will allow you to reset a menu plan week to the cycle.

    • All school menus follow their corresponding Menu plans. If a school menu week is edited, it goes “Off-plan” meaning that it’s no longer identical to the Menu plan and will no longer receive updates for that week. The next release will allow you to reset a school menu week to the plan.

Misc UI updates

  • Tidy, consistent top navigation bar

    • Actions → tools. Dedicated to standard editing operations like

      • Select

      • Copy

      • Delete

    • The more button (three dots icon), contains all the additional features related to menus such as

      • Week analysis reports

      • Nutrient standards

      • Portal

      • Template editor

  • Left navigation menu

    • We removed the automatic opening and closing behavior. You can now see the labels of each list item while it's closed which allows you to keep it closed and get more space for your menus, PRs, and pantry. You can still expand the it as usual using the button at the bottom

Did this answer your question?