[clug] Linux recipe management

[David Cottrill]

I think I've strayed way off topic here but...
PHP seems good to me because it is web based so pretty much every  
device can use the output - I do very little cooking with a computer  
around but I usually have the iPhone on hand. I'm open to suggestions  
of which language and why.
In Drupal parlance I'd make every ingredent a category so that they  
can be sub categorized easily. Probably have to create extra fields to  
cater for units of measurement on so on. For display I'd use Views to  
create listings (mains, soups, beers, etc) and do basic searches by  
recipe type.
A custom template or 5 and recipe display becomes pretty well  
customized.
What's left? Search by ingedients on hand becomes searching along the  
category tree for matches and displaying in ranked order.
Scaling recipes is easy to get more or less right. Getting it perfect  
relies on perfectly scaled recipes to begin with so we'll skip that  
for now.
Ingredient substitution would be done by moving up the category tree  
and making use of linked categories.
To get the whole system humming along there would need to be a built  
in awareness of key ingredients and that I fear would be difficult to  
do properly.

Gee, sounds so easy I might have to do it when I get spare time...
David

On 19/09/2009, at 10:50 PM, Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:

> David Cottrill <cottrill.david at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Perhaps a Wordpress plugin? Was going to suggest Drupal but that  
>> seems like
>> overkill.
>
> I keep wondering if either of these is a good solution, but what I  
> really want
> the software to do really exploits the weaknesses of these tools.  I  
> don't
> want a time-linear set of recipes, even with tagging to attach  
> categories to
> them.
>
> I want something that supports a *lot* of structured information  
> about the
> recipes, has a deep understanding of their content, and can do  
> helpful things
> like scale recipes, provide ingredient substitution information,  
> search by
> "what can I cook with what I have", and similar rich interactions.
>
>
> This isn't a bad suggestion, though, and I could probably turn  
> Drupal to the
> purpose if I wanted to invest enough time (and PHP code) into  
> building plugins
> and integrating them.  I mostly lost heart at "PHP" though. :)
>
>> Has anyone persisted with KRecipe?
>
> Nope.  It was sufficiently poorly matched to my expectations that my  
> three
> trials have all ended in failure.  It just doesn't work the way I  
> want it to.
>
>
>> As a chef I can honestly say the most important thing is getting the
>> ingredient list easy to navigate. Eg: 'plain flour' is impossible  
>> to find (I
>> always search for flour under 'F') whereas 'flour, plain' is easier.
>
> *nod*  When I talk about custom output, what I want is to have it  
> generate
> something in a few experimental styles, as well as the ones that I  
> find
> acceptable.  This is because, as you say, sensible access to the  
> ingredients
> in pretty crucial to the process.
>
>        Danie
> -- 
> ✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel at rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 1 
> 55 707
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