Gravity Forms
+ Weekly Meal Pre-Orders

A school, nursery, holiday camp or workplace canteen that already uses Gravity Forms can take meal orders a week ahead. The Gravity Forms Weekly Meal Pre-Orders add-on lets you set a menu for every service day of a week, or copy last week's menu in one click, with dietary tags such as vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free or halal, an optional price and an optional daily limit per meal.

On your order form, parents or staff pick a week, add each person with their class or group and a dietary note, and choose a meal for every day, or no meal. The total updates as they choose. Each day closes at its own cut-off time, for example 10:00 on the working day before, in your site's time zone. The server checks the cut-off, the menu and the daily limits again on every order and every change, so a late or edited order for a closed day is refused. A summary e-mail with a signed link lets orderers change or cancel meals until each day closes.

The kitchen gets an exact production report for each day: counts per meal, a class by meal grid, the dietary notes, printable labels per class (PDF) and a CSV. Kitchen staff can open the report with their own login, without access to your forms. Payment is optional and stays with the Gravity Forms payment add-on you already use; otherwise orders are marked pay later. The add-on has no payment code of its own. Everything runs on your own server, with no outside service. Allergen information and safe preparation remain the responsibility of the meal provider. For Gravity Forms 2.9 and newer.

Menus are stored per week in the add-on's own table: for every service day a list of meals with dietary tags, a price and a daily limit. The order field shows the weeks that have a menu, from this week up to the number of weeks you open, and marks each day as open or closed. A day closes at its cut-off: a number of working days before the meal at a time of day, worked out in your site's time zone. The browser only sends the chosen meal ids. On submission the server reads the menu again, checks that every day is still open, that each class or group is one of yours and that no daily limit is exceeded, and refuses the order otherwise, before any payment add-on runs. It then stores a snapshot of the order with names and prices from the menu and adds the meals to the Gravity Forms order, so the order total and any payment add-on use your menu prices. Each meal becomes a line in the add-on's own table, which the kitchen report, the labels, the CSV and the daily limits read. The edit link carries a signature made with a secret key only your site knows, tied to the entry; every change goes through the same server checks, and meals on closed days cannot change. The payment state is read from the payment status Gravity Forms stores on the entry. The add-on makes no outside HTTP request beyond the licence and update checks.