Overview

EatFoodHere is an Italian-inspired restaurant site rebuilt as a PHP and MySQL application. The project started from a front-end restaurant assignment, then grew into a server-rendered site with relational menu data, reusable templates, form persistence, and an admin maintenance workflow.

The interesting part wasn't the restaurant theme. The useful engineering work was turning a static ordering concept into a database-backed application with real server-side state and operational tools.

What I Built

• Five user-facing PHP pages with shared header, navigation, and footer includes.
• A menu page that reads categorized menu items from MySQL via a joined query.
• Reservation and contact forms that validate input, preserve entered values on errors, and store submissions.
• An authenticated maintenance dashboard for menu CRUD, reservation review, and contact-message handling.

Database and Backend

The database uses related category and menu-item tables for the public menu. The setup script seeds categories and 20 menu items, then additional tables store reservations, contact messages, and admin accounts. Database access goes through PDO from a shared connection include.

I also added an auth layer for the maintenance page. The assignment only required menu editing, but an unauthenticated admin surface didn't feel like a real application. I adapted the auth pattern from prior PHP coursework and expanded the page into a small dashboard.

Implementation Notes

• Database tables: Category and menu item tables drive the public menu, while reservation, contact-message, and admin tables support operational workflows.
• Admin workflow: The maintenance dashboard supports menu-item CRUD, reservation management, and contact-message review behind a seeded admin login.
• Templating: Shared header, navigation, footer, database, and helper includes keep repeated PHP structure centralized.
• Forms: Contact and reservation forms validate user input, preserve values after errors, and store submissions server-side.
• Assets: Instructor-provided class assets were combined with documented royalty-free Wikimedia Commons food imagery.

Why It Matters

This project shows the practical side of server-side web work: taking form input seriously, shaping database tables around UI needs, keeping repeated layout in includes, and building maintenance tools that match how someone would actually operate the site.