Managing Meals

We worked late into the night last night and hammered out the last of the bugs in our comments and ratings system. It seems to be working pretty good. This will hopefully be that base which we can build several more features, such as:

• Search for highest rated
• Search for easiest rated
• Sort in your recipe box by ratings
• etc.

We do plan to have a full discussion thread for recipes (as needed, and in the future) so the comments are meant to be short comments - 140 characters or less. This is not meant for general discussion. With that in mind you can only rate or comment on any recipe 1 time. Your rating and comment is easily changeable though, should you change your mind.

All that said we hope you enjoy the new feature and take advantage of it as new features to come will be based off of that.
mind.

Thanks

ManagingMeals.com

We’ve fixed a couple of very small bugs dealing with the images, nothing worth mentioning. In addition we added the images section under “Recipe Collection” so that you can see the most recent image to be uploaded and a random image. From there you can click on the recipe name or the user to get more information. Currently there is only one image, but my wife and I will add some for our recipes as we get time.

Doing this testing revealed a medium sized bug. When a user deletes a created recipe from their recipe box it would make it disappear in the recipe log. This was because it was unassigning the user. To fix this we created a user named “Unassigned” and all recipes that get deleted will then be reassigned to the unassigned user name. Sound complicated? In short you should never truely be able to delete a community recipe (one that you’ve created from scratch) unless your an administrator. If you decide that you don’t want the community to see your recipe (after youve deleted it) you can pm me (thorst) and we will consider removing it. This specifically is for a recipe that was created as an example. We will not remove recipes that are valid just because you dont want to share them.

Thanks all,

ManagingMeals.com

We’ve finished the image upload/cropper on recipes. Feel free to try it out and let us know if something isn’t working. We’ve also updated the calendar page so that you can now click on a recipe and have it take you to the recipe box.

We’ve got everything built in a testing scenario, and we’ve succesfully tested in all major browsers. We have validated the code. Now all thats left is to clean it up a bit and put it into our live scenario. Hopefully the next time we post it will be to let you know its finished. Check back soon.

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