Millstone Café

Concept build. A custom-coded WordPress project built without a page builder — a hand-built child theme, custom post type, custom taxonomy, and a hand-coded meta box powering a structured café menu.

My role: WordPress developer, custom theme builder, and back-end PHP developer.

Tools: WordPress, custom child theme, WP_Query, custom post types and taxonomies, hand-coded meta boxes, vanilla PHP/CSS.

The challenge:

Most of my recent work uses Elementor to build service-business sites quickly. For this project, I set that aside to prove a different skill: building WordPress functionality entirely in code. The goal was a café menu that a real owner could manage from the WordPress admin — organized by category, with prices and photos — without relying on a page builder or a plugin like ACF for the custom fields.

The build needed a custom post type for menu items, a custom taxonomy for categories, a secure hand-coded field for price (with proper nonce verification and sanitization), and a custom page template to query and display it all grouped by category.

This is a concept build, not a client engagement, built to demonstrate custom WordPress development without a page builder.

The Solution:

A custom child theme with a registered custom post type (Menu Items) and hierarchical taxonomy (Menu Categories), plus a custom page template that queries and groups items by category using WP_Query and tax_query, pulling in the hand-coded price field and featured images.