[Phpwiki-talk] Facilitating recipes with phpwiki

[Marjorie R. <mro...@ma...>]

I've concluded that since people aren't using my site, it could probably be made easier to use. Looking for ideas, and also code.

I've announced the site to a raw foods listserv twice, to a raw food seminar of people who cared enough to pay $40 to be there, and to (great) vegetarian thanksgiving meal, and to this listserv, of course. Of more than 600 people receiving the announcement, only three people have added content to it, including someone on this list. 

Here are some ideas I've got:

Recipes are a pain in the neck. Especially for people who don't know html. And for those who understand the need for a line break, adding %%% and lower-case <br> is just not fun. <pre> is not intuitive. So one thing that might be helpful is a module to automatically add the line break codes. (It might be a check box in the edit form called "recipe format.")

(I still would rather have a line break universally be a line break, actually, though when I mentioned that before, the answer, I think, was that it would mess up other tags. Any way around that? I think I really do want line breaks to be line breaks, without needing the ugly and time-consuming %%% and lower-case <br> codes.

Maybe some dialog box could help facilitate recipes. A spot for ingredients, a spot for instructions...

Maybe a utility for importing standard recipe formats (Meal-MasterTM v7.x or v8.x recipes and Mastercook 3.x).
Now You're Cooking (which imports these formats) is my favorite standalone recipe software, by the way. http://www.ffts.com/features.htm

Of course, html import would be helpful, as then I could invite people who have rawfood web pages to submit their recipes, without requiring that they spend time reformatting stuff.

Maybe could be some easier way to both add a new recipe, and add a link to it on the recipes page. (The average non-wiki user might not figure out the bracket idea for adding a new page, even if I tell them.)

Anyhow, I'm not a good enough php programmer to do _any_ of these things. I'm simply identifying a problem (people aren't using the site, and one person also emailed me and said she couldn't figure out how to use it, and recipes are a pain to enter) and some possible solutions. (including easier ways to add recipes via easier line breaks, importing recipe formats, importing html, and any other ideas or practical solutions you may have.

People respond favorably to this website when they hear about it. They just aren't using it yet. Ideas, and solutions welcome. 

(I might be willing to pay someone to add some good recipe solution to phpwiki, if it seems that the solution will require considerable time. Could be kind of a cool addition. I don't want to supervise the project too closely, and of course, I don't want to pay huge sums of money, but talk to me on list or off, if you have ideas.)

Send personal email to mro...@ch..., or respond to this list.

Margie