Quick start

A working menu, a working CTA and today's first slip, in about fifteen minutes. Everything below is in the order you should do it in.

You need: a WordPress 7.1 site you can install a theme on, PHP 7.4 or newer, and the two zips from your download. If you have not unpacked the download yet, read Install and update first — the most common mistake is uploading the wrong zip.

1. Install the theme (2 minutes)

1. Appearance › Themes › Add New › Upload Theme.
2. Choose table-and-type.zip — the small one, about half a megabyte. Not table-and-type-package-1.0.0.zip, which is the whole download and is not a theme.
3. Install Now, then Activate.

The site now looks like a café with no content in it: every band, every heading and every action is there, filled with placeholder rows you could edit by hand. That is the theme on its own, and it is deliberate — see what the plugin adds.

2. Install the companion plugin (3 minutes)

The dishes, the services, the hours, the slips and the booking rows are content, so they live in a plugin rather than in the theme. Your data then survives a theme change, which is the point.

1. A notice appears after activation. Follow it, or go to Appearance › Install plugins.
2. Table and Type Core → Install → Activate. WordPress downloads it from https://tailthemes.com/wordpress/plugins/table-and-type-core.zip.
3. While you are there, install One Click Demo Import too — it is free, from wordpress.org, and it is what imports the demo in step 3.

Nothing is forced: you can dismiss the notice, skip either plugin, and install plugins/table-and-type-core.zip from your download by hand instead (Plugins › Add New › Upload Plugin) if your server cannot reach ours.

Which plugins are required? None of them. With both switched off every page still renders, and every companion-plugin block on the imported demo is replaced by the theme's own static twin — the same card, slips, hours, facts and grinder, frozen at the demo's Wednesday lunch. What stops is the derivation: the live served-now, the dietary filter, the header's open status, the enquiry form and the structured data. See with the plugin switched off.

3. Import the Mireille demo (5 minutes)

Mireille is an invented 34-seat all-day café in Montréal. It is one demo, filled deeply: 52 dishes across 10 sections and 5 services, 8 hours rows, 7 slips, 2 booking rows, 6 blog posts.

1. Appearance › Import Demo Data.
2. Pick Mireille and press Import.

What the import adds:

It also sets home as the front page, blog as the posts page, and the site timezone to America/Toronto, because the demo's hours are Montréal's.

About the photographs. The 22 photographs and 2 drawings are not inside your download. They are fetched from our server while the import runs, and they are licensed for the preview only — replace them with your own before you go live. They are AI-generated; the item description says so, and Credits lists every one. If your server has no outbound network access the import still completes; the media simply does not arrive.

Slip dates land relative to your import day, not to ours, so you get five live slips whatever month you import in.

4. Change one price (1 minute)

1. Dishes in the admin menu, and open any dish.
2. Dish details › Price, in the site's currency: 17, or 4.25 when there are cents. It prints as $17 or $4.25.
3. Update.

That is the permanent price. The footer's "Card last changed …" stamp moves on its own — it is read from your dishes, never typed.

5. Post one slip (2 minutes)

A slip is a dated sheet clipped to a card. It says what changed today, strikes the row it replaces, and comes down by itself when its window closes. Nothing it touches is ever edited.

1. Slips › Add New.
2. Kind: Today.
3. Clipped to: a service — Lunch, say.
4. Lines: one line per row, text | price. For example Soupe de courge, graines grillées | 900.
5. Showing from and Until: this morning, and this afternoon.
6. Publish, then look at the home page.

The sheet is on the card, stamped with the time and your name. Move Until into the past and it is gone, and the card underneath is the truth again. Nothing was deleted.

If the editor refuses the save, it is telling you the slip would have rendered nowhere. The five refusals and their exact wording are on Slips.

6. Point the CTA at something real (2 minutes)

Settings › Site details:

• Address, Coordinates — this is what the hero's filled Get directions action uses. No map is embedded, ever; the link opens the visitor's own map app.
• Booking › Mode: link, and the URL of your own reservation page. The header's quiet Book a table and the /book page both follow it.
• Order › Mode: direct and your ordering page, or none to hide the seam entirely.

Read Booking, orders and enquiries before you choose provider mode: it is the one setting on the whole site that loads another company's script, and it changes what your privacy page has to say.

Before you go live

• Delete the style-guide page and the navigation row that points at it. It is a page, never a template; deleting it takes nothing else with it.
• Edit the notices page. It is the one page you edit rather than delete — see Privacy.
• Re-measure the access facts (door width, washroom, tables) for your room. The demo's are somebody else's measurements of an invented café.
• Replace the demo photographs with your own.
• Read the allergen sentence at the foot of the card against what your kitchen will actually say.

Where to go next

• Where everything comes from — every region of the home page, the field that fills it and the screen that edits it.
• The four editing tasks — the four things an owner actually does.
• Troubleshooting — when a page is stale, a slip will not save, or dark mode flashes.