Recent updates
What's New
A running plain-language list of what's changed on Theme Park Foodie. Newest first.
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Feature
In-park mobile rate widget
Menu-item pages on mobile now show a fixed bottom bar with big 👍 / 👎 tap targets — one-hand voting at the booth. Anonymous visitors can save their rating by entering an email; we send a one-tap sign-in link (no password to type).
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Feature
Passwordless sign-in via email
New magic-link flow — enter your email, get a one-click sign-in link. Existing accounts continue to work with passwords exactly as before. Magic-link is the friction-free path for the in-park rate widget and future email-first flows.
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Feature
Changelog page
This page. A running plain-language list of what we've changed and why, oldest at the bottom.
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Performance
Faster page loads under traffic surges
Popular pages now cache at the Cloudflare edge and pull common data from Redis. First page load feels the same; repeat loads and email-blast surges are dramatically faster and more reliable.
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Performance
Persistent database connections
Reused MySQL connections across requests instead of opening a new one every time. Cuts a slice of latency off every page load and reduces load on the database.
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Discovery
Security headers site-wide
Added HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, and Permissions-Policy. Small trust signals to browsers and search engines; measurable improvement in security-audit scores.
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Discovery
Menu items now include an AI-answer summary
Every menu-item page now leads with a 1-2 sentence summary describing what it is, where you find it, price, and rating — front-loaded so ChatGPT search and Perplexity cite the summary directly.
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Discovery
FAQ blocks on festival + restaurant pages
Food & Wine hub and every restaurant page now embed structured Q&A data (dates, marketplace count, dining plan acceptance, cuisine, price range). Google + AI search surfaces these blocks in rich snippets.
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Fix
404 pages no longer accidentally indexable
When a controller returned a 404 for a missing restaurant or menu item, the response was mislabeled as indexable. Fixed — search engines now correctly skip missing-page URLs.
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Discovery
OAI-SearchBot, Applebot, and more crawlers explicitly welcome
Added six additional AI-search crawlers to robots.txt (ChatGPT search, Apple Intelligence, Perplexity's retriever, and others). Referrals from ChatGPT search show up as utm_source=chatgpt.com.
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Discovery
Fresh-content ping to Bing + AI systems
Added IndexNow support — when a restaurant, menu item, or article is edited, Bing (and by extension Copilot, Perplexity, ChatGPT search) get pinged within seconds instead of waiting for the next crawl.
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Discovery
Festival pages structured for search
EPCOT festival hub now emits FoodEvent structured data with sub-marketplaces, dates, and dish samples. Helps Google and AI systems understand and cite the F&W 2026 lineup.
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Data
Real "new" vs "returning" pills on F&W items
Menu-item pages now show accurate ✨ New this year and ⭐ 30th Anniversary Classic badges, sourced from Disney Food Blog's editorial tags. Replaces the previous over-eager classifier that flagged every item as new.
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Design
Cleaner marketplace section headings
The Food / Beverages subsection headings on festival marketplaces got restyled — dropped the beige background, added a coral accent underline, more breathing room between groups.
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Feature
Festival items grouped by marketplace
Food & Wine hub picked up a new "By Marketplace" view alongside the existing "By Item" grid — makes it easier to grocery-shop a whole booth's menu in one glance.
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Data
Real prices + opening dates on festival items
Scraped Disney Food Blog's editorial coverage to fill in prices, opening dates, and food/beverage classification on ~250 F&W 2026 items where Disney's API leaves them blank.
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Feature
Venue types for restaurants
Every restaurant now carries a venue type (quick-service, table-service, bar-lounge, cart-kiosk, festival kitchen). Improves search filtering and the summary language used across the site.