Managing Meals

As we stated on March 30th, 2009 on our blog we were able to prototype a star rating (and short comment) system. That prototype was put on hold in order to do the backups, but now that the new backup system is up and running we are back to proto-typing new features.

The original plan was to implement star rating/short comments, then a discussion for each recipe (for longer reviews, and replying to other comments), and then images on recipes. However, seeing that this site was created for my wife, and she specifically stated that the next feature has to be images on recipes, we’ve reordered our road map.

It was just today that I looked on our calendar and saw a new meal. I wanted to know what it was since I had never had it, but since we don’t have images I was left to imaging what it would look like. So consider us convinced. The next major feature will be images. Tonight I began a prototype that I’m actually very impressed with. It currently is a small JavaScript that will allow you to select the portion of the image that you want to display. With this you can essentially zoom in and crop a picture. With a little bit of ajax and php we should have a pretty nice interface. So look for images in the coming month or so, depending on the amount of free time we have.

Back to the backups. Like I stated earlier, backups are up and running. In the current state we are only getting backups nightly, but they are locally and remotely stored. So we should never lose that much data again. Hopefully we can tweak this later to do incremental backups. Also, myself and another staff member were able to finish updating all the recipes with cleared categories. So we should be completely back up and running.

Thanks,

ManagingMeals.com

We’ve uploaded the most recent changes, notably the multi-category search. You can get to it by clicking “more” on the left hand side. This was the last piece needed before we can begin building our advanced search page.

We’ve also updated the holiday displayer in the category section. It now displays the next holiday that is to occur from our categories section. The old system was static and required administrators to update the category list to show the next relevant holiday. This is the first step that we are taking to hopefully display the most relevant categories on the left hand side. In the future we will count each category search and then display the most commonly search categories on the left.

With these updates we did some database cleanup. Specifically on the categories table. Unfortunately our script didn’t work completely as planned and we lost the categories for 111 recipes. We’ve started fixing these recipes, but unfortunately we will need to manually go through each one in order to fix them. Stay tuned.

Thanks,
ManagingMeals.com

We’ve almost finished our second round of updates for the lists. We hope to have them published in the next week. Once we finish testing all the scenarios and add the changes that we just added to the current list we will be able to go live.

Some nice changes include:

• Orderable List
• Multiple select for deletes, but without checkboxes
• Completely ajaxed add/remove/reorder list items

That doesn’t sound like a lot but to get it all working together took quite a bit of work.

We hope you enjoy it and will post again onces its available for all to use.

Thanks for using the site.

ManagingMeals.com

We’ve updates several areas of the website. Most changes you probably will never notice, but they are in the change log if your curios.

Most notably, the calendar appears slightly different. With neater borders and coloring for disabled days, we’ve maximized room and made it easier to look at days at a glance. Speaking of, you can no longer add notes or recipes to days that have past, you can still remove them though.

The biggest changes comes to the grocery list. You will see several changes in the coming weeks as we rebuild the list page from the ground up with new and more convenient features. The first feature (with last update) was multiple deletes. This update allows you to remove or add recipes directly on the list. Adding will add all the recipes ingredients and deleting will delete the ingredients should they still exist.

Enjoy

ManagingMeals.com