Flavor – Restaurant Menu vs Meow Mailer – Free SMTP, Everything Included

🎉 Flavor 2.0 is here The biggest release so far — a workspace of its own, and online table reservations. Flavor now opens in its own admin panel. No more hunting through WordPress submenus: one Flavor entry leads to a proper workspace with a fixed two-level navigation, a dashboard, a streamlined dish editor and a setup checklist that ticks itself off as you go. Light and dark mode included. Take table bookings on your own website. Guests request a table from a booking form; you approve or decline straight from the e-mail or from the panel. Opening hours and closed days, a capacity limit, turn time, confirmation e-mails with a calendar file and a one-click cancellation link, an approval inbox, search by name, phone or e-mail — and old bookings are deleted automatically. Nothing you built is lost. Every dish, category, setting and shortcode carries over untouched. Only the interface around them is new. Upgrading is the normal one-click update. If you use Flavor Pro, update both plugins. What Flavor does Flavor – Restaurant Menu is a modern WordPress restaurant menu plugin for restaurants, cafés and bars. Create mobile-friendly food menus with categories, images, prices and a responsive card grid — then display them anywhere with a shortcode, Gutenberg block, Elementor widget or WPBakery element. Take table bookings from your own website with the built-in reservation form. No WooCommerce required. QR code table stands, EU allergen labels and multiple layouts are available in Flavor Pro. What you get for free The workspace Standalone admin panel — One Flavor entry in the sidebar opens a proper workspace: fixed two-level navigation, dashboard, dedicated dish editor, light and dark mode, and a setup checklist that ticks itself off from the real state of your site Unlimited dishes — No cap, no trial. Categories, price, description, featured image and sort order Categories — Hierarchical, with drag & drop ordering, renaming and deleting on one screen The menu on your site Card Grid layout — Responsive image cards with the built-in Elegant Dark theme Category filter — Animated filtering on the frontend, optionally sticky while scrolling Subcategories — Shown as section headings when a parent category is filtered Currency — Any symbol, placed before or after the amount; the side is detected automatically, so $32.00 but 32.00 € All page builders — Gutenberg block, Elementor widget and WPBakery element, plus the [flavor_menu] shortcode for everything else Table reservations A booking form on your own website — [flavor_reservation] or the matching block, widget and element. Nine fields, spam honeypot, rate limit, works without JavaScript You decide on every request — Approve or decline from the notification e-mail or from the panel; the guest is informed either way Opening hours that match reality — Per weekday, closed days, lead time, how far ahead guests may book, a capacity limit and a turn time that can grow with party size. Hours past midnight are handled as one business day E-mails that do the work — Confirmation with a calendar file and a one-click cancellation link for the guest, a notification with occupancy context for you Daily service board — Today’s bookings with the day’s covers and the busiest moment, an approval inbox, search by name, phone or e-mail, an overdue marker and a nudge for past bookings nobody closed Data protection built in — Consent checkbox, and old bookings are deleted automatically after a number of days you choose Flavor Pro Pro is a separate plugin available at flavor-menu.com. Install it alongside this one and every Pro feature unlocks automatically — nothing is migrated, nothing is re-entered. Multiple prices — Unlimited price variants per dish with labels (e.g. Small / Large, 0.2 l / 0.75 l) 7 Layouts — Card Grid, Price List, Table, Horizontal Card, Featured, Compact List, Sectioned List 6 Design Themes — Elegant Dark, Clean Light, Warm Earth + 3 fully configurable Custom Themes with 7 color pickers each 40 Google Fonts — Curated Serif, Sans-Serif and Display fonts under Design → Typography. Optional local self-hosting for GDPR-compliant delivery Allergens & Nutrition — 14 EU mandatory allergens (Regulation 1169/2011) + nutritional values per 100 g. Layout-specific display: 180° flip (cards), floating popup (lists), abbreviation chips (table) Guest Ratings — 1–5 star ratings in the Card Grid layout. No login required. Duplicate protection via localStorage + server-side IP hash Floor plan & seating — Draw your dining room once, then seat guests at real tables instead of guessing from a list: drag & drop editor, live room view, table suggestions, walk-ins and a per-table timeline Reservation analytics — Covers per day and per hour, no-show rate and average party size over 7, 30 or 90 days Multiple Locations — Assign dishes to one or more branches and filter per location in the shortcode. Each branch keeps its own opening hours, capacity, floor plan and reservation inbox Badge System — New, Popular, Chef’s Choice, Seasonal, Spicy and more QR Code / Table Stand — Print-ready table stands as PDF. 3 styles (Minimal, Elegant, Branded), DIN A5/A6, logo upload, background image, 4 color pickers, live preview CSV Import / Export — Import dishes from CSV (Excel/Google Sheets compatible). Supports all dish fields: title, description, subtitle, categories (incl. subcategories via Food > Starters), prices with labels, badges, locations, allergens, nutrition values. Missing categories are auto-created. Existing dishes (matched by title) are updated. Configurable delimiter (comma or semicolon). Preview before import, per-row result report. Export all dishes as CSV. Downloadable empty template. SEO / Schema.org markup — Every menu outputs Schema.org structured data (JSON-LD): Menu, MenuSection and MenuItem with prices (Offer) and nutrition (NutritionInformation), so search engines and AI assistants can read your menu. No configuration required, works in every layout Columns & Image Ratio — 2/3/4 columns, 4:3/1:1/16:9 image ratio Subcategory Support — Hierarchical categories with parent and sub-headings in all layouts Page Builder Support Gutenberg (native block, live preview in editor) Elementor Free 3.5+ WPBakery Page Builder Shortcode [flavor_menu title="Our Menu"] Available parameters: title, description, category, limit, show_filter, sticky_filter, hide_all_btn, default_category, currency, currency_position, el_class [flavor_reservation title="Book a table"] Available parameters: title, intro, style (light / dark), el_class External Services Your menu and your reservations never leave your server. All assets (CSS, JavaScript, fonts) are bundled with the plugin and served from your own site, and no menu, dish, guest or booking data is ever sent anywhere. The plugin does use one external service, and only if you choose it: Freemius (opt-in, disabled by default) Flavor uses Freemius to deliver update notices and security warnings, and to handle license activation for the separate Flavor Pro plugin. Nothing is transmitted until you click “Allow & Continue” on the opt-in screen. If you skip it, the plugin works exactly the same and no connection is made. If you do opt in, the following is sent to freemius.com and refreshed periodically: Your WordPress user’s first name, last name and e-mail address Your site’s homepage URL and title, WordPress and PHP versions, and site language The Flavor plugin and SDK versions, and whether the plugin is active or was uninstalled The names, slugs, versions and active state of your installed plugins and themes You can withdraw consent at any time — open Flavor → Account and choose Disconnect, or use the opt-out link on the plugin’s row under Plugins. Transmission stops immediately, and the plugin keeps working. What is collected and why: freemius.com/product/opt-in/27618/flavor-restaurant-menu/ — Terms of Service: freemius.com/terms/ — Privacy Policy: freemius.com/privacy/ Table reservations Reservation e-mails to you and your guests are sent with WordPress’ own wp_mail(), so they travel through whatever mail setup your site already uses. No booking data is sent to us or to any third party.

For years, almost every WordPress site I ran ended up with a different plugin just to send email. I never really chose them. I installed whatever looked fine at the time, because honestly there is no clear winner. Most of them advertise features I don’t need, or hide the basics behind a paywall. At one point I simply wanted to see the emails my site had sent, or failed to send, and even that asked me to upgrade. That felt wrong. So I decided to build the simplest and most honest email plugin I could for WordPress. You pick one provider, set it up once, and every email your site sends goes through it. Everything is logged, so you always know what happened. No upsell maze, no ads, nothing basic locked away. That is Meow Mailer, and all of this is free: One provider, set up once. Pick the one you use and forget about it. No confusing multi provider routing. Import from your current SMTP plugin. Already set up with WP Mail SMTP or Easy WP SMTP? Meow Mailer notices and copies the provider, credentials and sender over in one click, so switching never means digging out your API keys again. A fallback for when it breaks, free. Name a second provider (or plain WordPress, which needs no setup) and it steps in only when the first one refuses an email. Your mail still goes out, the log tells you exactly who failed and why, and an alert lets you know your main provider needs a look. A real email log, free. Every email in a clean table with recipient, subject, provider and status (sent, failed, offline, pending). Click any row to read the full message, see the error, and resend it. Many plugins charge for this. Here it is free. Stays out of the way. Until you pick a provider, Meow Mailer doesn’t change how your email is sent, so activating it never breaks what already works. It still logs everything WordPress sends on its own, so you get the log from the moment you activate it. Never miss a failure. A dashboard warning appears when emails fail, so silent problems don’t go unnoticed. Dismiss it once you have had a look and it stays away until a new email fails. Failure alerts by email, free. Get told when your site stops being able to send, instead of finding out from a customer. The alert is sent by WordPress itself rather than your provider, so it still reaches you when the provider is the thing that broke. One alert per hour at most, however many emails fail. Alerts on Slack, Discord or Teams, free. Paste a webhook URL and the alerts and the weekly summary are posted to your chat as well, so finding out that email is broken never depends on email. Handy when you look after a lot of sites. Individual emails are never posted anywhere: this tells you about your site, not about the people it writes to. Weekly summary, free. A short email with what was sent, what failed, and the most common errors. Nothing is sent on a quiet week. Control WordPress’s own emails. Switch off the notifications WordPress sends by itself: new user registrations, password and email change confirmations, comment moderation, automatic update reports. Password resets are never affected, so nobody gets locked out. Background sending. Email goes out after the page has loaded, so your visitors never wait on the mail server. Offline mode. Capture every email in the log without sending. Perfect for staging and development. Filters and export. Filter by status and provider, search by subject or recipient, and export to CSV. Test and resend. Check your setup with an HTML or plain text test, and resend any logged message in one click. Auto prune. Keep logs forever, or delete anything older than 7, 30 or 90 days. Multisite ready. Set your provider up once on the main site and let every site of the network use it, or leave each site to configure its own. Email logs always stay per site. Light and private. No bloat, no tracking. Your credentials can live in wp-config.php instead of the database. What Meow Mailer will never do No open or click tracking. Other email plugins advertise it as a premium feature. It works by putting an invisible pixel in every message and rewriting every link to pass through a redirect, which means logging when your recipients read their mail and what they clicked. That is surveillance of the people your site writes to, it is personal data you then have to account for under the GDPR, and rewritten links make your email look more like spam, not less. Meow Mailer does not do it, and that is not a gap waiting to be filled in a Pro version. There is no Pro version. Supported providers Generic SMTP, Mailgun, Brevo, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Postmark, SMTP2GO, Mailjet, Resend, MailerSend, Maileroo, Gmail / Google Workspace (OAuth 2.0), Microsoft 365 / Outlook (OAuth 2.0), and Zoho Mail (OAuth 2.0). About Meow Apps Meow Mailer is part of the Meow Apps family of plugins, focused on doing one thing well with a clean, modern interface. External services Meow Mailer contacts an external service only after you choose and configure an email provider. Until then (the default “None”) and in “Offline” mode, it sends nothing anywhere. When you pick a provider, your outgoing email (recipients, subject, body, headers and attachments) and the credentials you entered are sent to that provider so it can be delivered, and only when your site actually sends an email. For Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Zoho Mail, Meow Mailer also contacts their OAuth servers when you connect and refresh your account. Nothing else is ever sent. You choose a single provider. Generic SMTP talks only to the server you configure. For the others, please review their terms and privacy policy: Mailgun (terms, privacy), Brevo (terms, privacy), SendGrid (terms, privacy), Amazon SES (terms, privacy), Postmark (terms, privacy), SMTP2GO (terms, privacy), Mailjet (terms, privacy), Resend (terms, privacy), MailerSend (terms and privacy), Maileroo (terms, privacy), Gmail (terms, privacy), Microsoft 365 (terms, privacy), and Zoho Mail (terms, privacy). Development Meow Mailer is open source. The full source, including the React code used to build the admin interface, lives on GitHub.