Restaurant Management System — on NimbusCMS

The Restaurant Management System, rebuilt as an application on NimbusCMS instead of the original 2014 hand-rolled PHP. It runs a full restaurant — floor, orders, kitchen, payments, staff roles, reservations, reports — plus a public site with online ordering, as a Nimbus plugin co-located in this repo (plugin/) composed with the official CRM (guests) and a theme (theme/). Zero Nimbus core change for app logic.

The original 2014 version is preserved in archive/ (and still runnable — see its README). This is the current system.

Try the live demo

https://ras.nimbuscms.dev — a public sandbox that resets hourly.

• Guests: the homepage, the menu, and online ordering (/order) with a simulated checkout (no real payment).
• Staff: sign in at /admin — the login page has an “Explore as …” picker for each role. Every login uses the password restaurant-demo: waiter@ras.demo (floor), cook@ras.demo (kitchen), manager@ras.demo (everything + menu + guests), admin@ras.demo (the whole CMS), and more.

Signing in as a waiter vs. a cook vs. a manager shows the capability model live: a cook has no payment button, a floor login can’t open a guest’s CRM record, and only the manager sees Reports.

Why this exists (platform validation)

Beyond the app, this rebuild is the first real validation of Nimbus as a platform: if a whole restaurant can be built on Nimbus without pushing restaurant-specific logic into the CMS core, the platform is proven. It drove two reusable core capabilities — a read-only content capability for plugins (ADR 0029) and fine-grained plugin capabilities (ADR 0030) — with nothing restaurant-shaped added to core. The running ledger is in docs/PLATFORM-VALIDATION.md; the architecture is in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md and docs/adr/0001.

Status — complete

• ✅ Menu — categories and priced items, as Nimbus collections.
• ✅ Tables / floor — rest_table, live status, mobile floor board (the RAS circular table tokens), capability-gated admin + MCP.
• ✅ Orders — open on a table, pick from the menu (snapshotting name + price), server-computed totals, workflow (ADR 0029).
• ✅ Kitchen display — a cook’s New → Preparing → Ready screen.
• ✅ Payment & turn — settle (server-computed amount), close, turn the table.
• ✅ Staff & roles — floor / kitchen / manage capabilities gate the terminals (ADR 0030).
• ✅ Reservations — a booking book linked to CRM guests by id, without the restaurant ever reading CRM data (the PII boundary holds).
• ✅ Reports — a manager dashboard (revenue, active orders, top items).
• ✅ Public site — a homepage (hero, about, live featured dishes, hours), the guest menu, and online ordering with a simulated checkout, in the dark RAS identity (theme/).
• ✅ Deployed — live at https://ras.nimbuscms.dev, resets hourly.

Layout

plugin/            the restaurant plugin (type: nimbuscms-plugin)
  src/             RestaurantPlugin, Schema, Tables, Orders, Kitchen, Reservations,
                   Reports, admin pages, MCP toolset, online-order view-data + routes
  templates/       default templates for the public order page (theme-overridable)
  tests/           DB-backed test suites (run in CI)
theme/             the public "RAS" theme (homepage, menu, order pages)
app/collections.php  the menu content model, declared as data
bin/provision-menu.sh  installs the menu onto a running Nimbus via its public API
deploy/            deploy kit — DEPLOY.md runbook, seed-demo.php, reset scripts, demo logins
docs/              ARCHITECTURE, PLATFORM-VALIDATION, ADRs, per-slice design docs
archive/           the original 2014 app (unmodified; runnable via Docker)

Run it locally

The app is a Nimbus plugin; a site consumes it via a Composer path repository (Nimbus discovers plugins by type: nimbuscms-plugin), alongside the CRM and the theme. The full, reproducible recipe — a Docker image built from a Nimbus base + this repo’s plugin/ + the CRM + the theme/, then migrate + seed — is documented in deploy/DEPLOY.md, and the demo data (roles, one login per role, the menu, sample floor/orders/reservations) is created by deploy/seed-demo.php.

In short:

1. Build a site image: the Nimbus base image, plus composer require danmat/restaurant (via a path repo pointing at this repo’s plugin/) and nimbuscms/crm, and copy theme/ into the site’s themes/restaurant/. (See deploy/DEPLOY.md.)
2. Bring up the app + a MySQL, then:

   php bin/nimbus migrate
   php bin/nimbus install --email=admin@ras.demo --password=<a strong password> --name="RAS Admin"
   php deploy/seed-demo.php     # roles, logins, menu, sample data

3. Visit / (homepage), /menu_items (menu), /order (online ordering), and /admin (staff).

Just the Menu vertical against an already-running Nimbus:

NIMBUS_URL=http://localhost:8080 \
ADMIN_EMAIL=admin@nimbus.test ADMIN_PASSWORD=password \
  bin/provision-menu.sh

The original 2014 app

Preserved in archive/ — procedural PHP + Bootstrap 3. It wouldn’t start on a modern PHP (it uses the removed mysql_* extension), so it ships with a Docker setup that runs it authentically on PHP 5.6:

cd archive && docker compose up --build   # then http://localhost:8090

The waiter's floor from the 2014 app — the original circular table tokens that the rebuild's RAS uplift brought back: