phpwiki-talk

[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

[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

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Facilitating recipes with phpwiki

[Adam S. <ad...@pe...>]

Marjorie Roswell wrote:

>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. 
>
Just as an FYI, that's actually not too bad.  wiki's confuse people ... 
a lot.  despite the fact that they are incredibly simple a lot of people 
really resist the idea of using them.  it took me months to get people 
regularly adding contect to the personaltelco.net wiki and that's 
despite the fact that my audience was fairly hardcore geek and there 
were 70+ people on a mailing list specifically working on a project.

wiki's build slowly, give it time.  in the mean time make sure that 
*you* use it as much as possible, as it becomes more and more useful 
people will use it more and more.

my personal recommendation would be that if you want to use wiki, resist 
the temptation to make a special recipe module.  the strength of wiki 
comes from it's ability to do everything.  if you did want to do 
something to make importing recipies easier maybe a good way of doing it 
would be to setup a little web form which would convert other formats 
into wiki markup, so they can just cut and paste it into the wiki.  this 
way you preserve the strength of wiki and still make peoples lives easier.

some of your other concerns are totally valid, i'd love to see %%% 
replaced with <br> etc.

Adam.

>  
>

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Facilitating recipes with phpwiki

[Margie R. <mro...@ch...>]

Thanks for your thoughts. Note:  I actually want linebreaks ("not <br>")
to convert to <br>.

my thinking is if that "wikis confuse people a lot," apart from training,
there is probably more that can be done on the user-interface end to make
it less confusing.

One thing I want to do is to move EditThis to the top of the page, for
instance. Haven't dissected how to do that yet, actually. Clues welcome.

Another item I forgot to mention is the desire to print only the recipe
(one of the nested tables...) Very minor point. Major points are:

- want html input
- want EditThis at the top of the page
- want single returns to be linebreaks. (that would negate the need for a
special recipe input form.)
-<small> didn't work for me at the beginning of a line.

Someone pointed out that I forgot to mention the URL.

It's rawfoodwiki.org.

Best Regards,

Margie


--
Margie Roswell
3443 Guilford Terrace
Baltimore, MD 21218
H: 410-467-3727
W: 410-455-6802
E: mro...@ch...
W: http://hello.to/maps

On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Adam Shand wrote:

> Marjorie Roswell wrote:
>
> >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.
> >
> Just as an FYI, that's actually not too bad.  wiki's confuse people ...
> a lot.  despite the fact that they are incredibly simple a lot of people
> really resist the idea of using them.  it took me months to get people
> regularly adding contect to the personaltelco.net wiki and that's
> despite the fact that my audience was fairly hardcore geek and there
> were 70+ people on a mailing list specifically working on a project.
>
> wiki's build slowly, give it time.  in the mean time make sure that
> *you* use it as much as possible, as it becomes more and more useful
> people will use it more and more.
>
> my personal recommendation would be that if you want to use wiki, resist
> the temptation to make a special recipe module.  the strength of wiki
> comes from it's ability to do everything.  if you did want to do
> something to make importing recipies easier maybe a good way of doing it
> would be to setup a little web form which would convert other formats
> into wiki markup, so they can just cut and paste it into the wiki.  this
> way you preserve the strength of wiki and still make peoples lives easier.
>
> some of your other concerns are totally valid, i'd love to see %%%
> replaced with <br> etc.
>
> Adam.
>
> >
> >
>

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Facilitating recipes with phpwiki

[Russ M. <rm...@no...>]

You might want to think about making ingredients lists (what I imagine are
the most line-break intensive part of recipes) into actual unordered lists.

russ

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Facilitating recipes with phpwiki

[Joby W. <joby@u.washington.edu>]

Margie,

1) HTML input already exists.  The RawHtml plugin will give you the 
ability to include Html -- but this is dangerous since people can easily 
mangle the pages, and do other more nasty things

2) Single linebreaks == linebreak.  Although this is intuitive, this 
would make the source for many of us less readable, as Russ Miller 
suggested ordered/unordered lists would work for a lot and having two 
returns for an end of paragraph is not that hard to figure out.

3) The location of your navigation buttons are all determined by the 
template files in:  themes/<profile>/templates/ .   Modifying them has 
been covered many times on this list.

jbw

Margie Roswell wrote:

> Thanks for your thoughts. Note:  I actually want linebreaks ("not
> ")
> to convert to
> .
>
> my thinking is if that "wikis confuse people a lot," apart from training,
> there is probably more that can be done on the user-interface end to make
> it less confusing.
>
> One thing I want to do is to move EditThis to the top of the page, for
> instance. Haven't dissected how to do that yet, actually. Clues welcome.
>
> Another item I forgot to mention is the desire to print only the recipe
> (one of the nested tables...) Very minor point. Major points are:
>
> - want html input
> - want EditThis at the top of the page
> - want single returns to be linebreaks. (that would negate the need for a
> special recipe input form.)
> - didn't work for me at the beginning of a line.
>
> Someone pointed out that I forgot to mention the URL.
>
> It's rawfoodwiki.org.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Margie
>
>
> --
> Margie Roswell
> 3443 Guilford Terrace
> Baltimore, MD 21218
> H: 410-467-3727
> W: 410-455-6802
> E: mro...@ch...
> W: http://hello.to/maps
>
> On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Adam Shand wrote:
>
>
> >Marjorie Roswell wrote:
> >
> >
> >>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.
> >>
> >
> >Just as an FYI, that's actually not too bad.  wiki's confuse people ...
> >a lot.  despite the fact that they are incredibly simple a lot of people
> >really resist the idea of using them.  it took me months to get people
> >regularly adding contect to the personaltelco.net wiki and that's
> >despite the fact that my audience was fairly hardcore geek and there
> >were 70+ people on a mailing list specifically working on a project.
> >
> >wiki's build slowly, give it time.  in the mean time make sure that
> >*you* use it as much as possible, as it becomes more and more useful
> >people will use it more and more.
> >
> >my personal recommendation would be that if you want to use wiki, resist
> >the temptation to make a special recipe module.  the strength of wiki
> >comes from it's ability to do everything.  if you did want to do
> >something to make importing recipies easier maybe a good way of doing it
> >would be to setup a little web form which would convert other formats
> >into wiki markup, so they can just cut and paste it into the wiki.  this
> >way you preserve the strength of wiki and still make peoples lives 
> easier.
> >
> >some of your other concerns are totally valid, i'd love to see %%%
> >replaced with
>  etc.
> >
> >Adam.
> >
> >
> >>
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.net email is sponsored by: Get the new Palm Tungsten T
> handheld. Power & Color in a compact size!
> http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?palm0002en
> _______________________________________________
> Phpwiki-talk mailing list
> Php...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/phpwiki-talk

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Facilitating recipes with phpwiki

[Margie R. <mro...@ch...>]

> 3) The location of your navigation buttons are all determined by the
> template files in:  themes/<profile>/templates/ .   Modifying them has
> been covered many times on this list.

hey, I know how to edit the template. But I didn't know how to dissect
  <?= Template('navbar') ?>
to segregate out the EditText button from the rest.

I can probably figure it out, but my initial efforts didn't provide fruit
on that front.

/web/rawfood/themes/Portland/templates/body.tmpl



1) HTML input already exists.  The RawHtml plugin will give you the
ability to include Html -- but this is dangerous since people can easily
mangle the pages, and do other more nasty things

Obviously, I don't want "nasty things." I'd be looking for input of basic
tags for tables. non-lower case <BR> tags would be helpful, too.

2) Single linebreaks == linebreak.  Although this is intuitive, this
would make the source for many of us less readable, as Russ Miller
suggested ordered/unordered lists would work for a lot and having two
returns for an end of paragraph is not that hard to figure out.

I guess I can tell people to put stars in front of the ingredients.

Best Regards,

Margie


>
> jbw
>
> Margie Roswell wrote:
>
> > Thanks for your thoughts. Note:  I actually want linebreaks ("not
> > ")
> > to convert to
> > .
> >
> > my thinking is if that "wikis confuse people a lot," apart from training,
> > there is probably more that can be done on the user-interface end to make
> > it less confusing.
> >
> > One thing I want to do is to move EditThis to the top of the page, for
> > instance. Haven't dissected how to do that yet, actually. Clues welcome.
> >
> > Another item I forgot to mention is the desire to print only the recipe
> > (one of the nested tables...) Very minor point. Major points are:
> >
> > - want html input
> > - want EditThis at the top of the page
> > - want single returns to be linebreaks. (that would negate the need for a
> > special recipe input form.)
> > - didn't work for me at the beginning of a line.
> >
> > Someone pointed out that I forgot to mention the URL.
> >
> > It's rawfoodwiki.org.
> >
> > Best Regards,
> >
> > Margie
> >
> >
> > --
> > Margie Roswell
> > 3443 Guilford Terrace
> > Baltimore, MD 21218
> > H: 410-467-3727
> > W: 410-455-6802
> > E: mro...@ch...
> > W: http://hello.to/maps
> >
> > On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Adam Shand wrote:
> >
> >
> > >Marjorie Roswell wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >>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.
> > >>
> > >
> > >Just as an FYI, that's actually not too bad.  wiki's confuse people ...
> > >a lot.  despite the fact that they are incredibly simple a lot of people
> > >really resist the idea of using them.  it took me months to get people
> > >regularly adding contect to the personaltelco.net wiki and that's
> > >despite the fact that my audience was fairly hardcore geek and there
> > >were 70+ people on a mailing list specifically working on a project.
> > >
> > >wiki's build slowly, give it time.  in the mean time make sure that
> > >*you* use it as much as possible, as it becomes more and more useful
> > >people will use it more and more.
> > >
> > >my personal recommendation would be that if you want to use wiki, resist
> > >the temptation to make a special recipe module.  the strength of wiki
> > >comes from it's ability to do everything.  if you did want to do
> > >something to make importing recipies easier maybe a good way of doing it
> > >would be to setup a little web form which would convert other formats
> > >into wiki markup, so they can just cut and paste it into the wiki.  this
> > >way you preserve the strength of wiki and still make peoples lives
> > easier.
> > >
> > >some of your other concerns are totally valid, i'd love to see %%%
> > >replaced with
> >  etc.
> > >
> > >Adam.
> > >
> > >
> > >>
> >
> >
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------
> > This SF.net email is sponsored by: Get the new Palm Tungsten T
> > handheld. Power & Color in a compact size!
> > http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?palm0002en
> > _______________________________________________
> > Phpwiki-talk mailing list
> > Php...@li...
> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/phpwiki-talk
>
>

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Facilitating recipes with phpwiki

[Jeff D. <da...@da...>]

> non-lower case <BR> tags would be helpful, too.

Okay, done (in CVS).  Patch at:
http://cvs.sf.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/phpwiki/phpwiki/lib/InlineParser.php.diff?r1=1.18&r2=1.19


> ...as Russ Miller
> suggested ordered/unordered lists would work for a lot...
> I guess I can tell people to put stars in front of the ingredients.


A while ago there was some talk about being able to specify the bullet
type for the unordered lists.  E.g. '*' give the standard big dot,
'-' for dash, '+' for plus, etc, etc.   An extension to this scheme would
be something like '.' for no bullet.   That might help for your recipes.

(Selectable bullets would only work on browsers with good CSS support,
I think.) 

I'm not convinced any of this is a good idea, but I'd thought I'd
bring it up again for discussion...

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Facilitating recipes with phpwiki

[John K. <li...@ke...>]

Hi,

I just noticed that there's a page on your wiki that has an 
apostrophe in its name. Is this okay in 1.3.3? I use 1.3.2 and 
apostrophe's are a nightmare - it screws up any attempts to do 
backlinks, removes and stuff.

http://www.rawfoodwiki.org/index.php/emma's%20amazing%20hummous

I'd still encourage people not to use spaces or punctuation in their 
page names, ie
EmmasAmazingHummous

John.

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Facilitating recipes with phpwiki

[Jeff D. <da...@da...>]

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:52:52 +0000
John Kershaw <li...@ke...> wrote:

I just noticed that there's a page on your wiki that has an 
> apostrophe in its name. Is this okay in 1.3.3? I use 1.3.2 and 
> apostrophe's are a nightmare - it screws up any attempts to do 
> backlinks, removes and stuff.

Apostrophe's shouldn't be a problem (but they might).  If they
do cause problems, it's a bug.

There were some problems I remember which were due to buggy
PEAR DB code.  These should have gone away now that we provide
our own PEAR code.  I don't think 1.3.3 includes our own PEAR code
though (is there a "lib/pear" subdirectory in the distribution?),
so whether or not you have trouble may depend on what version of
PEAR code you have installed...

Re: [Phpwiki-talk] built-in sourceforge list advertising

[<ph...@de...>]

On Mon, 25 Nov 2002 12:25:53 -0500, "Marjorie Roswell"  wrote:

	<snip content and looking at mailing list sig>

=> -------------------------------------------------------
=> This SF.net email is sponsored by: Get the new Palm Tungsten T 
=> handheld. Power & Color in a compact size! 
=> http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?palm0002en

	So much for filtering email here with procmail to easily
eliminate incoming SPAM messages containing links in the body
such as:	"http://ads.example.com"

	<sigh> Sure wish they hadn't done that,

	- Don