Another week, another hRecipe release. It feels good. More and more people, such as yourself, are using hRecipe on a regular basis. With more people using the plugin, more issues are found and cleaned up, more search results get nicely formatted into Rich Snippets, and the world become a nicer place.
Ok maybe not quite…
…but it’s true: when you use hRecipe to add microformatting to your WordPress blog’s recipes, you really are making the world of data a better place!
See, computers are stupid. Really stupid. Computers don’t understand “recipes” at all. Using hRecipe allows the computer (in this case a search engine) to understand “recipe.” But it takes your help to make this happen; a human has to “hold the computer’s hand” in a manner of speaking.
When you help the computer to understand recipes, the computer will help everyone find recipes. Everyone wins!
Every little bit helps.
hRecipe release 0.5.6
This release deals with a couple of issues. The first is catching up with donation listing since the last release. Donations can’t support hRecipe financially, but donations do something almost as important: they make me, the author, feel encouraged. When authors feel encouraged, they write Good Stuff.
The second issue is dealing with an “anti-pattern,” which is a bit of code that “looks cool” for whatever reason, but turns out to be a really bad idea in the long term. In this case, the offending code was based on code in a very popular and widely distributed plugin. The rewrite was simple, and the fix is distributed with this release.
Specifically, this Fatal error: Call to undefined method should be considered closed.
Report bugs. Request features.
The WordPress support forums are excellent for many purposes, but tracking bugs isn’t one of those purposes. It’s hard for developers to keep up with issues reported by users on the forums because there isn’t a way for developers to easily monitor bug reports.
In contrast, when you report a bug or request a feature using the github’s hrecipe issue tracker, I get an email right away. This makes it a lot easier for me to respond in a timely manner.
You can also leave comments on the blog posts or pages here.
In any case, the most important thing is to report something, somewhere when you have an itch you need scratched. I’ll find it one way or another.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
hey, great plugin. couple of suggestions:
1. make the hrecipe CSS file optional. many of us have already our own CSS file definitions…… so please do not use any text formatting that might override or interfere with current theme design.
2. the microformats for ingredients amount is missing form current version….
according to the manual the suggested format is:
White sugar:
3/4 cup
thanks! marcus from hungary
Hi , Mark, thanks for the suggestions. Pointwise:
1. CSS is subclassed hrecipe, feel free to modify or delete.
2. Ingredient amounts are optional according to the microformat specification. Adding code to handle amounts increases complexity for both user and programmer. It would be nice to have, I agree. Any programming help appreciated.
Hi Dave–I’m late to this conversation, but I wanted to thank you for NOT having microformatting for ingredient amounts. The main reason I chose your plugin over another one is the ease of cutting and pasting a list of ingredients into the plugin. With the other plugin, I would have to copy or type each individual amount and ingredient, resulting in possibly dozens of cuttings & pastings. I love that with hrecipe, I cut the list of ingredients once and paste it once. This is making it so much easier to update all my existing recipes and post new ones.
I want to thank you for all the improvements you’ve made in the plugin lately. At this point, I can’t think of anything I want it to do that it doesn’t already. (Well, maybe if you could make it so that if we put nothing in the Recipe and Summary fields, the colon after it would be removed, but that’s a small quibble and takes seconds to edit out.)
Thanks again for all your hard work!
which file to modify to control the output of the plugin, i wish to change the order of the elements. ie. prep time after summery and so on….
hrecipe_format.js, swap the lines how you want. Here’s a reference in a recent commit of the source:
https://github.com/doolin/hrecipe/blob/master/js/hrecipe_format.js#L303
(The specific line number for this block of code will change from release to release.)
I write what’s known as a “literate” style for programming, so you should be able to read what’s going on fairly easily.
This has also given me a couple of ideas for adding this into the hrecipe options. No promises, but it’s got me thinking and that’s the first and most important step.
thanks! i appreciate the support you offer !
hi, with the last update, the tabs on the form no longer work correctly in safari 5.04. all of the tabbed sections show up stacked. just letting you know.
Ben, this should be fixed now.