Core Concepts

Understand the Dineway vocabulary — agents, skills, content, menus, SEO, and admin unlock — so you can give better instructions and review results with confidence.

These are the ideas worth knowing before you ask an AI agent to work on your restaurant site. You do not need to memorize them — just skim so you recognize the terms when they come up.

The basics

AI agent

Your AI coding assistant — Codex, Claude, Cursor, or something similar. It reads files, runs commands, edits code, and follows skills. You describe what you want; the agent figures out how to do it.

A good way to start any session:

Act as my Dineway restaurant website operator. Before changing anything, inspect the current site and tell me your plan.

Skill

A skill is a set of instructions your agent follows for a specific kind of work. Think of skills as recipes: the agent knows the steps, but you decide when to use each one and what ingredients to provide.

Restaurant skills cover building sites, enriching place details, using the CLI, designing pages, and running SEO workflows.

Which Dineway skill fits this task, and what will you verify before using it?

Prompt

A prompt is what you tell the agent. Good prompts include the restaurant name, city, what you want done, what source material to use, and what the agent should not invent.

A weak prompt: “Make the site better.”

A strong prompt:

Improve the homepage for a neighborhood Italian restaurant in Toronto. Use only verified facts from the site, keep changes as drafts, and show me what changed.

CLI

The Dineway command-line tool. Your agent uses it to create projects, load content, inspect collections, manage media, run SEO research, and deploy. You usually do not type these commands yourself — the agent does.

Run only read or validation commands first. Explain any write command before running it.

Your content

CMS and admin

The CMS (content management system) stores everything your site displays — pages, blog posts, menu items, gallery images, SEO metadata, and more. The admin interface is the browser-based dashboard for managing that content after you unlock it.

Before admin unlock, your agent manages the CMS through CLI commands or MCP. After unlock, your team can also use the admin dashboard directly.

Collections and content items

A collection is a group of similar content. Common restaurant collections include pages, posts, menu_items, locations, and showcase_sites. Each entry inside a collection is a content item.

List the collections in this Dineway site and tell me which ones I should be updating regularly.

A navigation menu controls the links in your header, footer, or other navigation areas. This is different from your restaurant’s food menu — “menu” in Dineway usually means “where do the links go.”

Review the primary navigation like a customer. Make it easy to find the food menu, reservations, location, and contact page.

Media

Media means images, PDFs, and other uploaded files. For restaurants, the most important media work is using real photos of your food, venue, team, and events — not stock images or AI-generated pictures pretending to be real.

Audit the gallery images. Tell me which ones need better filenames, alt text, captions, or replacement with real restaurant photos.

Search and AI

SEO metadata

SEO metadata helps search engines and answer engines understand each page. It includes the page title, description, canonical URL, Open Graph image, structured data, and local signals like your city and neighborhood.

In plain terms: good SEO metadata means when someone searches “Italian restaurant Toronto,” your site has a better chance of showing up.

Review the SEO metadata for the homepage and menu page. Keep recommendations factual and specific to this restaurant.

MCP

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a way for an AI assistant to use approved tools on your site — managing content, media, menus, search, and site context through a structured interface instead of editing files directly. It is most useful after your first site exists and you want ongoing help.

Site context

Site context is durable knowledge your agents carry across sessions. It can include your brand voice, seasonal strategy, dietary notes, and operating rules like “never mention delivery unless I confirm.”

Recording context once prevents agents from re-inventing your preferences every time they work on the site.

Record this as site context: our tone is warm and seasonal. Never mention delivery unless I confirm. Always list allergens when describing dishes.

Draft and publish

Draft content is not visible to the public. Published content is live. Always ask agents to work in draft mode unless you explicitly approve publishing.

Apply changes as drafts. Do not publish anything until I approve the final version.

Admin unlock

Admin unlock is the step where your restaurant team gets browser-based access to manage the site through the admin dashboard. It comes after the site is built and reviewed — it is not a prerequisite for getting started.