First of all, I have had an overwhelming response to the plugin and I am so glad that people are using it and enjoying it. One of the most frequently asked questions I am getting is when Pro is coming out. So I wanted to break things down just a little and also get your feedback.
How ReciPress is Made
ReciPress is a plugin developed by me, Tammy Hart, completely 100% … no one else, it’s just me, folks. WordPress is an amazing publishing platform with a community made up of thousands of developers, hundreds of contributors and a handful of core committers. While I would love to have that kind of help in development, and I do hope to be able to expand into a team sometime in the future, right now, I’m all you got. And lest you think I’m complaining, I’m not, I just want to be clear.
As an individual, I have a full time job as well as a bit of side work here and there and speakings gigs that I do. I’m also a wife and mother. Needless to say, I’m a busy gal.
While I have absolutely loved pouring my heart and soul into what ReciPress is so far, I’ll admit that I was more than unprepared for such a demanding audience. I’m absolutely flattered and I want to meet all of your demands because I love what I do, and I love that it is appreciated.
ReciPress Roadmap
Originally, I had planned to have Pro ready by the end of this month just in time for my presentation at Food Blog South this coming weekend. But then the holidays happened, illness hit my family, and life in general got in the way. Regretfully, I’ve not even been able to start on the new features and they are still stuck in my head and in notes. But please don’t lose faith in me… I’m not giving up!
Also originally, I had planned on releasing the plugin for sale on CodeCanyon.com. This was to cut out a lot of the marketing and eCommerce hassle of selling the plugin. But now I’m thinking of deterring from that plan. The reason is that CodeCanyon works hard to maintain a vibrant, feature-rich offering and are therefore very picky and stringent about accepting plugins for sale. It’s not that ReciPress doesn’t offer a lot of features, but now I’m thinking I might release those features in phases. This way, the most anticipated features are available to you as soon as possible, rather than waiting for the entire plugin to be finished and polished.
This will take a bit of a time and monetary investment for me to get things set up here to sell the plugin, but hopefully should be better for getting ReciPress Pro to the public sooner rather than later.
Your Feedback
This is where you chime in. I want to try to release a minimum of two features at a time. As a customer, you would be able to upgrade without paying again to receive new features as they are released. The process would work pretty much the same way it does now with ReciPress free. So the question is, what order should these features come in?
Use the poll below to select two of the features you want to see the most. Be sure to visit the features page for more information. If you don’t see a feature you want, please leave a comment and as similar ideas accumulate, I’ll add them to the poll.
Loading ...A note
I also know that there are a few issues with ReciPress.com that need to be addressed, mainly the support forums. I am trying to get back to those as soon as I’m able as well. I appreciate your patience.
Definitely the printable recipes first! Also make it possible to add more than one recipe in a post
Thanks for the feedback, Jamie. Don’t forget to vote in the poll so that your options are saved!
Hi,
3 print modes with:
• shopping list
• recipe
• all
Greetings from France
nota: i send Fr-fr files to Tammy !!!
Thanks for the update and all your hard work! I’m already a huge fan of this plug-in and I’ve only begun using it!
1. Please consider adding the ability to create multiple Ingredient & Instruction headings instead of just one (if this isn’t already possible).
Example:
Ingredients:
1/2 Cup Onions
1/2 Cup Cheese
Custom Optional Ingredients
1/2 Cup Garlic
1/2 Cup Olive Oil
2. Allow for [Edit / Deletion / Sort] of Custom Taxonomies within the Recipress Configuration Screen. For example, I use categories on my site to sort my recipes by: Meal Time, Kitchen Tool, Special Diet, etc… not just by Cuisine, Courses & Ingredients (this may already be possible, and I just lack the know-how)
3. Output a searchable/sortable Recipe page… kind of like this one using the ReciPage plugin… http://nourishedkitchen.com/recipes/ The problem with the ReciPage plug-in, is that recipes have to be stored on their site for it to work.
Perhaps these suggestions can be PRO Version features… I know I’d gladly pay for something like this! =)
Thanks for letting me make these suggestions… and thanks again for creating such a wonderful plug-in! I’m excited to see where you take it next! =)
First, let me thank you for a great plugin. Just a few more features and it will be the perfect recipe plugin.
Printable recipes is my first choice but I would love to see both a way for users to submit their recipes from the frontend (without dashboard to post) and a users specific recipe box for them to save their favorite recipes to.
Some of the frontend editors incorporate some of the recipress fields to their form but it isn’t the same and certainly doesn’t work the same.
I’m very interested in picking up the Pro version. Knowing what order what features will be released would be great.
Tammy,
A client of ours wants to add a YouTube link to the recipe that will show like a caption overlay just below the featured image.
And as a fellow developer I just wanted to say good work. This is a very professionally done plugin, and I wish you success.
Robert
Robert,
Thanks for the compliments! It’s a lot of work, but I’ve gotten such great feedback, and it’s very rewarding.
I would say add a meta box to the fields array in php/meta_box.php and then output it in php/output.php
As a developer, what would you think about a way to hook into the fields array for adding more? I guess the real trick would be in outputting it properly.
Tammy,
I will probably use the meta box implementation for now. But for future use, I think that a hook into the fields array would be useful. As to output order you have two options, but this one is probably the best: use an attribute, rather than the array position. This is the most flexible implementation in my opinion. When sorting the resulting array your callback can compare against the caption or slug as a fallback for collisions. That way you could even weigh down certain of your fields (say, by tens instead of 1,2,3,4…).
Good morning Tammy,
first of all tnx for this plugin
it’s still a bit buggy, but it definitively rocks 
about my request, i’m wondering if you plan to add the hRecipe microdata and RDF as an alternative to microformats, according to Google Recipe Specs: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=it&answer=173379
tnx in advance
gabriele – http://www.cookspot.it/en
I do plan on improving the hRecipe compatibility. I’m still learning about all the nuances surrounding it as documentation seems sporadic and inconsistent. Thanks for your interest and your patience.
Hi Tammy, great job on the plugin so far. It has a lot of potential. I’m probably one of the demanding customers you’re referring to in this post. If I sounded irate in some of my emails/posts I apologize, but it’s been over a week and you still haven’t responded to (or even acknowledged) my emails and posts on the WordPress forums.
I realize this isn’t your full time gig and your life sounds busy, but if you expect people to pay for this, you need to show some sign that there’s someone on the other end listening (even if it’s just to say you’re a little busy right now).
Honestly I just want to help troubleshoot bugs, give feedback, and generally be a good beta tester, but I have to say I’m a little discouraged by the lack of communication.
Anyhow, I’m not sure if you saw my notes on WordPress, but before you start thinking about adding features, it would be great if you could make the existing ones work.
Specifically Google isn’t showing rich snippets for posts published using ReciPress because there are some required fields missing (author, and update). See my post on the WordPress forums for more details.
Also, the image upload function is not working. A community member on WordPress posted a hack to fix it, but it would be nice to see this fixed in the next version of the plugin. Also, using the hack, it does not size the images properly when inserted into the recipe (it uses the full size image even if I ask it use the thumbnail or another size).
Thanks for the feedback, Marc. I’ve been replying to so many emails and support requests, it’s hard to keep them straight sometimes. I do plan on devoting a lot of time tomorrow to fixing bugs, especially my support forum because it’s totally backfiring on me. I’m really serious about this plugin, just still figuring out how to balance everything.
All of my initial test with Google hRecipe gave me the desired results so I don’t know if something changed, or what, but I definitely hold that in high priority as it’s one of the most important features, in my opinion. So I’ll get on that.
Not sure why the image uploader isn’t working for some people, but I’ll also continue to improve that.
One of the lessons that publishing a public plugin has taught me is how different WordPress environments can be and how difficult it can be to debug things for everyone.
Thanks so much for your help and patience.
Hi Tammy thanks for your quick response. It sounds like you’re aware of the problem with the support forum, but I noticed two issues.
The first is when trying to register and enter an email address and password, it kicks you off to the homepage. Initially I assumed this meant the confirmation message was on it’s way but since I never got the confirmation message I took a closer look and there’s actually another form that shows up below the homepage asking for a username and email address again. I’m on OS X10.7.2 and was able to reproduce it in Chrome 18.0.1025.1 and Safari 5.1.2.
Once you fill out the second form, it does send a confirmation message and I’m able to log in, but the second problem seems to be a permissions issue. It appears I don’t have permissions to post in any of the forums.
As for the image upload issue, it looks like you’re on it through the WordPress forums, so that’s for that!
On the hRecipe thing, try running one of the recent posts on my blog through Google’s rich snippet editor and you’ll see what I mean. Just incase it was something on my end, I tried running a few posts (like the Citrus Beurre Blanc Pasta) on your showcase site (10 minute recipes) through the rich snippets tool and it gives the same errors.
Anyway, like I said before I think this has HUGE potential and I’ll be one of the first to pay for the plugin when the PRO version is available. Thanks for working so hard to bring us a great plugin!
I’m also porting over all the suggestions I made in the WordPress forums below so they’re easier to find:
Under ingredients, have an option to add subheadings. For instance I often break up my ingredients into groups. For instance, for a cake recipe I might have “for cake”, “for filling”, “for frosting” as three groups, which lets me say “add all the frosting ingredients into the bowl and mix” instead of listing each ingredient out. I think this is covered under the “Multiple Ingredient Lists Per Post” which I voted on.
Many food bloggers are already using thumbnails for their posts to show on archive pages and such. Right now in order to attribute a photo to the recipe, you have to upload it again (or look for it in the media library). Since the thumbnail URL is often stored in a custom field, it would be really helpful to be able to specify the name of the custom field in the ReciPress Options page so I don’t have to reupload the image every time.
Some steps require multiple images, it would be nice to be able to attach more than one image to a single step.
It would be nice to be able to rename the labels for each section within the recipe. For instance, I’d like to be able to change “Instructions” to “Method”.
Lastly, how do I hyperlink ingredients? I saw on your showcase site that the ingredients are hyperlinked. However I don’t see this anywhere in your documentation and when I try to add a hyperlink the ReciPress interface blows up (I literally had to delete the post and start over). I often link to wikipedia articles for unusual ingredients so readers can read more about them, I also sometimes link to secondary recipes (i.e. recipe for chicken stock) in a recipe so need to be able to do this.
I like your idea for adding multiple ingredients lists. I’ve been trying to think of ways to make this as easy as possible. Adding a section header would probably be the best user experience.
I’ve fixed the uploader to attach photos to posts so you should now see the gallery tab when adding photos to recipes and ingredients.
The Ingredients link to their taxonomy pages. I recommend creating a taxonomy-ingredient.php template that includes the ingredient’s description which can be set on the “Manage Ingredients” page. I think I’ll write up a tutorial on how that is done soon.
I don’t seem to have any problem with the image uploaded. The featured image shows up as the image in the recipe. I agree I would like to see multiple lists of ingredients/recipes in one post and would like to hyperlink to recipes within the ingredient list as well. I’ve only used the plugin on one post so far but that one seems to be working fine!
@Marc:
hyperlinked ingredients is definitively a STUNNING idea! I also like to link to a static page (or to a wiki source) about the ingredient!
Hello Tammy,
definitively a lot of troubles upgrading to 1.9.1!! I had to put my blog in maintenance mode!
1. some posts LOST the recipe linked to them
2. for those that doesn’t, the instruction step photos doesn’t show at all (i had to edit/update them, but it doesn’t resolve the problem all times)
3. for those that doesn’t lost photos, the css is messed up! have a look: http://www.cookspot.it/sfogliatine-al-miele-super-veloci/
i don’t know if there is some incompatibility with other plugin (perhaps wp super cache?) but i bug report anyway
ciao!
gabriele
Just FYI, the poll doesn’t let you select two options.
Hi Tammy,
Good work here! I hope you can fast track fixing the bugs on the free version. I’m also excited to see the new functionalities on the pro/paid version. I’ll be one of your customers when this is ready. Do you have a timetable for this? Let me know. Thanks.
Jovel
Voted user-submissions, and i m so glad i see in vote results its number one request
Truth is, visitors involving is priceless! Recipe submission and recipe rating are 2 must-have features in such a competitive area -well, we all are not expecting to beat those few mega-sites but at least have a decent, maybe small but user-friendly recipe blog
I have not installed the free version, doing the work manually by hand at the moment, will go for the PRO version the minute a front-end user submission form will be available.
Hi Tammy, any chance your plugin will be rolling out soon w/ at least the “User Submission” addition? I would REALLY like to offer this to a client. Worried we will have to look elsewhere
Love what you’ve done so far!!
Hello,
I am french and I am very happy to have found your plugin on wordpress.
It’s the best one.
It only needs the print version and since I spend a lot of time to calcul each calories, proteins etc… it will be a great value to have this option as well.
Thanks a lot
Hi Tammy,
Thanks for making a great plugin. I would love to be able to create a seperate page for recipes on my wordpress (since I use it more as a CMS than a blog). Ideally the recipe page would be the front page of a recipe database on that front page would be a search bar or table that enables users to search through cuisine, courses and skill levels. Each page would lead the user to a sub page containing the relevant data base (based on their search selection) of recipes. The “recipe press” plug in sort of does this but has many bugs and is out of commission- I’m sure you might have checked it out but if you havent http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recipe-press/screenshots/. Also I request a widget in the side bar that the users could use to search the recipes -that would be awesome! (when the user is looking a a specific post they will still have access to the search bar on the side!)- or a widget that suggests other recipes the user may like. Lastly check boxes that deonte gluten free, vegan, raw etc. would be most helpful for my website. Right now my work around is to use a plugin that shows only specific blog posts on specific pages- and I am creating my own searchable index (using hyperlinks) that lists the catagories the user may be interested in – linking the user back to my own site. its not bad- but I’m convinced anything designed by you would look wayyy cleaner than my work around
Thanks for your hard work, cant wait to pay you for a preium app!
With Warmth,
Heather
It would be nice to see a recipe box feature where users can save recipes from the site and share with friends
Hi Tammy… congrats for the plugin… is awesome.
One suggest for the Pro or next free plugin: give the hability for more taxonomies. I had included change your code…
the test is in: http://www.semglutensemlactose.com/doces/quindim-gluten-lactose/
Best regards.