Shortcode to elementor widget

A custom ExFood Elementor addon that transforms a shortcode-based restaurant menu into a flexible, visual, and mobile-friendly Elementor experience.

Turning a Shortcode-Based Restaurant Menu into a Custom Elementor Experience: One of the more interesting WordPress projects I worked on started with a simple problem: The restaurant website was working, but managing the menu wasn't easy. The site was using WooCommerce Food (Restaurant Menu & Food Ordering by Ex-Themes), and most of the menu components were built around shortcodes. That meant even small changes often required extra CSS or manual adjustments. The main problems were: • Everything was shortcode-based • No proper Elementor drag-and-drop controls • No visual way to filter food by category or restaurant branch • Styling required custom CSS again and again • Menu layouts needed manual adjustments • The floating cart wasn't working properly on mobile Instead of adding more CSS overrides and working around the limitations, I decided to build a dedicated solution. So I developed a custom ExFood Elementor Addon. What I built: 🔹 7 custom Elementor widgets Food Menu Grid, Restaurant List, Carousel, Table, Category Groups, Single Product Customizer and Header Cart. 🔹 Dynamic query system Products can be filtered by category, restaurant location, featured status and custom ordering, with AJAX pagination, Load More and Infinite Scroll. 🔹 Visual controls inside Elementor Typography, colors, spacing, borders, radius, shadows and hover effects can all be managed visually without touching CSS. 🔹 Custom restaurant menu layout A clean two-column layout with food image, title, price, description, dashed leader lines and add-to-cart controls. 🔹 Better image handling The addon automatically handles product galleries, attached images and fallback placeholders so missing images don't break the layout. 🔹 Mobile-first ordering experience Persistent floating cart, quick-view popups and live AJAX cart count updates across devices. The result? The restaurant team can now manage and style their menu directly from Elementor instead of dealing with shortcodes and repeated CSS changes. Adding a new dish, creating a seasonal menu, changing colors or adjusting spacing can now be done visually in a few clicks. For me, the interesting part of this project wasn't just building new widgets. It was taking an existing system with limitations and turning it into something that actually fits the client's workflow. Sometimes the best solution isn't finding another plugin. It's building the missing piece yourself.

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