Announcing Tidbits — a community recipe edition (v1.0.0)

[Scott_Sauyet]

@vilc

I’ll surely take some ideas from this and implement in my own recipe wiki (which I think you’ve seen in the previous discussions) or the other way around.

Absolutely. I remember that yours was my favorite of the variations I tried. I also very intentionally did not look back at them when I started this work a few weeks ago. I reread the relevant threads, but skipped anything that talked much about existing details. I didn’t even reread or try to incorporate my pretty fractions findings, which was initially meant directly for this work. I wanted this to be a clean slate. Sometime soon, I will go back and do some comparisons (and comparison shopping!), but not before I get 1.1 out with more complete internationalization.

@vilc

The basic design principles (links to ingredients, headings) are practical and easy to use from my perspective, I imagine it can’t be much simpler than that while using TW’s power.

Thank you. That’s very nice to hear. It means that I’ve met the most fundamental of my design goals.

@vilc

Points 2&6 and 8&11 of the guidelines seem to overlap, maybe the could be merged for readability?

I think you’re right about both, and that would reduce the number to a nice round 10. I’ll incorporate that into the next version.

@vilc

And a nice logo.

Thanks. I like it. I was so happy when I noticed the mirror symmetry and reversed the final T. I keep thinking of dropping the final S to make it more obvious, but it never quite seems right. I also keep thinking of normalizing the D / B, which are quite similar, but not quite mirror images of one another. I don’t because there’s something awesome to my mind about having a logo I can select as the text it represents. I think I would lose that.

@vilc

Why use edition rather than pack it all in a plugin?

@vilc

Just to make clear what I meant with the edition vs plugin:

I’m very glad you followed up with details here. Before I decided to spend a the weekend away from this project, I read your first post and was confused trying to work out a response. That’s what this is all about! Trying to create editions that would help new users understand the range and ability of TiddlyWiki!

@vilc

[I]t would be more inviting to tinker and customize the UI if [users] had the comfort of not being able to break anything

I certainly hadn’t thought about that. It makes some sense. I won’t do it during primary development, but I will try to think through the implications for a more complete release.

@vilc

There is some effort underway (or is it finished already?) for an official method for translating plugins, this could help keep things standardized.

Found it: PR-8957. I’ll read it more thoroughly soon.

@vilc

Perhaps some components of an “edition” like Tidbits would be so use case agnostic, that they could be made standalone plugins. Like I guess the add image UI and the registered fields seem to have nothing to do with the Tidbits. I mean, apart from the pre-populated fields like oven temp., the system itself is pretty universal.

Again, a good idea I hadn’t even considered. Perhaps $:/community can have a tools section that includes things like this. It might make building slightly more complex, but if it could cut down on custom code per edition, it’s definitely worth it.

@vilc

The only issue I have, is that the steps have to be one-level numbered lists, all other formatting ways seem to be ignored. I don’t know the limitations of the current setup. It’d be nice to allow other ways of writing steps.

Could you explain more what you might like as well as or instead of the numbered steps. We could easily enough just show the !! Steps section, but I like the highlight-current step bit in cooking mode, and am not sure how we might accomplish that with a more generic markup. Ideas welcome!

@vilc

it is not easy to scale for more than one photo per recipe.

I was thinking of this as the overview photo for the recipe, like an avatar might be on a personal profile. After that, you could easily use normal TW tools, including drag-and-drop for any others you want to include. There would be something to be said for using the current add-photo mechanism for a list of photos, especially if we wanted to deal with attributions. But then I’m not sure what happens after that. Do we show a string of photos instead of the avatar-like one? Rotate them? Carousel style? Just allow users to embed these photos in their text? Something else? Nothing seems obvious or simple. I’d love suggestions.

@vilc

Wouldn’t the instructions in a new recipe better be placed in the editor UI above the text editor (similar to the registered fields info below) rather than inside the text as an html comment?

Absolutely. On the to-do list.

@vilc

In my recipes wiki I use transcluded section headings, so instead of !! Ingredients I have {{$:/wilk/templates/headings/Ingredients}}.

I’m expecting to do something similar to this in the more complete internationalization phase.

@vilc

The cards folding/unfolding UI in Recipe Box works on mobile, but I don’t see the tiny triangle indicators on the folded cards on my phone.

I’ll look into it.

@vilc

About/Customizing – I thing links to system tiddlers would work better than code-formatted non-interactive titles.

Hmm, I thought I had done that. Have to see if it was lost in a merge or if I’m just misremembering. Either way, that’s absolutely right.

@vilc

I’m torn on what to think about the aliases (like Butter having an alias butter). […] Maybe there could be some visual clue next to the alias backlinks, reminding that “you see this alias backlink for your convenience, but it is better to use the proper ingredient names”.

I’m not thrilled with this either. I originally tried things with uni-link, and one other aliasing plugin, but neither did what I liked. I feel like this is a placeholder for something better, but I don’t know quite what that is. Right now, the best bet is that Autocomplete should gently urge you toward the canonical name.

---

Thank you very much for some fantastic feedback!

[Scott_Sauyet]

@jrbntt

Importing my existing (and very small) recipe set worked with minimal effort. I already had lists for Ingredients, and after tagging the imported tiddlers with the Recipe tag and a few small edits to headings, everything “just worked”.

Wonderful!

@jrbntt

I have a generic ingredient name (like “Egg”), which has aliases (“Egg white”, “Egg yolk”), so that I can link whichever specific ingredient from a recipe, but the recipes collect upward into the base Ingredient in addition to appearing on the specific alias.

Hmm, another interesting use of aliases. As I said in my recent response to @vilc, I feel like what I have is at best a good first pass. I still don’t know what a complete one would look like. I’ll keep this use-case in mind, but further suggestions would be very welcome.

@jrbntt

I had already decided on a naming convention for ingredients (title is singular, first word capitalized, etc) and create links using a named link (3 [[egg whites|Egg white]]). This fits my mental model for organizing everything while also making the ingredients list read like a typical recipe, but did require some up-front planning.

Another thing on my todo list is exactly this, with precisely the same conventions, and update my sample recipes (which were borrowed without real change from TheMenuDB.)

@jrbntt

Would it be reasonable to include Ingredient tags in the “Tags” card of the Recipe Box, or perhaps have separate cards for Recipe and Ingredient tags?

Sure. That makes sense, and it’s easy enough. I hadn’t done any ingredient tagging, but clearly there’s room for it.

@jrbntt

On mobile, I completely overlooked the button to expand the Ingredients list in cooking mode.

Any suggested way to make sure it’s discoverable? I love the two-column cooking view, but the one-column one for phone sizes is lacking the recipes. It really needs to, or we’d lose readability, but I want to make sure it’s trivial to get back and forth between them.

@jrbntt

My own thoughts are that the core functionality can (and possibly should) be bundled together into a plugin. The “edition” is simply a pre-configured TiddlyWiki instance with the plugin bundled in.

I do have to think this through some more, but I’m pretty sure I agree.

@jrbntt

The sample content could also be a separate plugin, so that it is easy to test out the edition with some relevant tiddlers, but the sample content is also easy to disable if the user wants to then get to work on their on content without setting up a separate empty instance.

There’s a separate mechanism for this, precisely because I don’t want any recipes or ingredients to be buried in shadow tiddlers. Can you look at it and see if it does what you need?

@jrbntt

So having something that looks nice and meets a common, practical use case does attract interest from a (mostly) non-technical user.

Design goal #1 - check!

@jrbntt

The source field is designed to work with a URL and renders as a link, which makes sense for any recipe found on the Internet. However, if I’ve taken a recipe from a book or my grandmother’s Rolodex, the URL behavior is obviously not the desired outcome.

This should be easy. Only format it as a link if it looks like a URL. If there’s not already a TW built-in for this, it will be easy enough to add. Now on the TODO list.

Thank you for some wonderful feedback!

[Thomas_Chuffart]

@Scott_Sauyet

I have a favor to ask, though. Would it be all right if I passed further machine translations to you for human review? I am sadly monolingual. I chose French as my first translation simply because my vaguely remembered few years of high school French is much better than my one semester of college Russian. I would love to have a French speaker review.

Sure I’d be pleased to review it.

[Thomas_Chuffart]

@Scott_Sauyet

That palette was the very last thing I did on this, and it was a little hurried. I expected some issues. But I don’t see this one. I’m sure I’m looking in the wrong spot.

No it’s this spot exactly. Today I tested it on a mac at work and it’s correct as your screenshots, but at home on a PC it’s oddly not the same rendrerind, I will post a screenshot later.

[jrbntt]

@Scott_Sauyet

There’s a separate mechanism for this, precisely because I don’t want any recipes or ingredients to be buried in shadow tiddlers. Can you look at it and see if it does what you need?

That’s better than what I was considering, since it lets the user keep any of the sample content they might want to hang on to.

@Scott_Sauyet

Any suggested way to make sure it’s discoverable? I love the two-column cooking view, but the one-column one for phone sizes is lacking the recipes. It really needs to, or we’d lose readability, but I want to make sure it’s trivial to get back and forth between them.

When I actually looked (while writing my post above), it wasn’t so difficult to see. I’m not really sure how I missed it in the moment while trying to use the recipe. I might try playing around with the size or coloring of the button, to see if it can pop out slightly without being obtrusive.

[TiddlyTitch]

@well-noted

I may have recipes to contribute myself.

Are you medieval on your Heini?

[vilc]

@Scott_Sauyet

what you might like as well as or instead of the numbered steps

Ideally any formatting would be displayed, and only selected “recommended” formats would get bonuses like the next/previous highlighting in cooking mode.

In my recipes I use simple hard line break formatting, so I guess it would be easy and would make sense to use the numbered lists. But I think this might be too limiting for a wiki intended for new users. Perhaps someone would want to transclude some common parts for various recipes, or place photos or some block mode macros variables.

@Scott_Sauyet

the overview photo for the recipe

That makes sense, didn’t think of it like that.

@Scott_Sauyet

Autocomplete should gently urge you toward the canonical name

AC can do many useful things in one trigger, like:

• search aliases
• search recipes (a recipe may be an ingredient in another recipe)
• search missing tiddlers (ingredients may be missing tiddlers, only linked to but not needing to be always implicitly created)
• display aliases alongside the suggestion
• display whether a match is an ingredient or a recipe or missing

For example:

This is just a demo, it would have to look cleaner and more understandable in the final version. I made it with suggestion filter:

[all[tiddlers+missing]!is[system]!is[draft]search:title,aliases<query>]

and display filter:

[<currentTiddler>tag[Ingredient]then[🥣 ]]
[<currentTiddler>tag[Recipe]then[📃 ]]
[<currentTiddler>]
[<currentTiddler>has[aliases]then[ (aliases: ]]
[<currentTiddler>get[aliases]]
[<currentTiddler>has[aliases]then[)]]
[<currentTiddler>is[missing]then[ (𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨)]]
+[join[]]

In my own recipe wiki, I almost never create tiddlers for ingredients. And I do have a couple of recipes linked to from other recipes. I think it should be priority to make linking as easy to use as possible. Maybe the “Recipes using …” template should be displayed on any tiddler linked to from a recipe, not just existing tiddlers tagged Ingredient?

But other than than, it’s perhaps better to left the aliases system without big changes for now and not waste too much time on it.

[TiddlyTitch]

@vilc

Ideally any formatting would be displayed, and only selected “recommended” formats would get bonuses like the next/previous highlighting in cooking mode.

Colossus awaits your input ..

TT

[Scott_Sauyet]

@vilc

@Scott_Sauyet

what you might like as well as or instead of the numbered steps

Ideally any formatting would be displayed, and only selected “recommended” formats would get bonuses like the next/previous highlighting in cooking mode.

I’ll have to think hard about that. I can see the rationale. But I can easily see the other side of it: Why don’t my steps show up? when users start including content outside such a numbered list.

@vilc

AC can do many useful things in one trigger, like: [ … ]

For example:

Oh, that’s very nice. I had no idea. I have so far included only Autocomplete a few times in wikis, and often turned it off for the same reasons I turn off autocompletion in my programmers’ text editors: it shows up more often than I want it, and it sticks around far longer than I need it. For this edition, it simply makes sense. But it’s nice to see how much more powerful it is than I realized. I will include something like that too.

@vilc

Maybe the “Recipes using …” template should be displayed on any tiddler linked to from a recipe, not just existing tiddlers tagged Ingredient?

I’ll have to think about that. I don’t imagine this would be used on wikis that have much other content… but I may be wrong. And if we go the plugin route, there would be no reason that recipes could not be just a small piece of a larger wiki. And then this would make a lot of sense: with both Basic Bread and Fancy Cake back-linked to the Marie Antionette page.

[vilc]

@Scott_Sauyet

Why don’t my steps show up? when users start including content outside such a numbered list.

Good argument, I agree. But I can just as easily imagine someone not using exclusively the numbered list (even something simple like sub-steps or free text comment in the beginning) and wondering why it doesn’t show up at all, even in the normal view mode.

@Scott_Sauyet

But it’s nice to see how much more powerful it is than I realized.

I’ve certainly gone too far with this AutoComplete example, this was just to start the discussion. I think at the very least AC should search the aliases field (for the butter example it doesn’t matter because the title search is case insensitive, but matches But) and missing tiddlers (explanation below).

____

As to the backlinks template, perhaps I focused too much on the solution rather than problem. The problem I see is that the current setup doesn’t leverage missing ingredients at all. Creating tiddlers for every ingredient works well in the demo and perhaps in a “blog” use case that is aimed to be shown to many people. But for a personal recipe list, I almost never have a reason to create an ingredient tiddler. I have 100 recipes and 230 ingredients, and of these 230 ingredients only 5 are existing tiddlers, the other 225 are missing.

I would like to see the missing ingredients somehow included, certainly in AutoComplete to avoid duplicates, and somehow (let’s leave details aside) in the UI of recipe and ingredient view templates.

[Scott_Sauyet]

Just released v1.0.1 — clearing the decks before the bigger localization pass begins. Three small things, all from feedback in this thread:

• Edition criteria merged from 12 down to 10, per @vilc. The two overlapping pairs — narrow scope + complexity ceiling, and idiomatic + modern TW — collapsed into single criteria. Philosophy/EditionCriteria.md and the OP both updated.

• Sample-data URL is now an explicit stable-fetch contract, per @simon. Noted in the README and as a description: field on the config tiddler — Tiddlyhost-style consumers can depend on it. Of course longer-term plans still involve moving the whole project, but only once, and the new location should remain stable after that.

• Cooking-mode toolbar button gets a brand-orange tint on mobile, per @jrbntt. A small visual nudge — should pop slightly without being obtrusive.

Updated live builds:

• https://crosseye.github.io/TW5-CommunityEditions/recipes/empty/
• https://crosseye.github.io/TW5-CommunityEditions/recipes/full/

Next up is the bigger localization pass — making tag names and recipe-body section headings translatable, picking up the French gaps @Thomas_Chuffart flagged, and aligning with PR-8957. More when there’s something to show.

Thanks @vilc, @simon, and @jrbntt for the suggestions I could just turn around — and to everyone else, please keep the feedback coming.

[Scott_Sauyet]

@TiddlyTitch

A minor issue First. On Chrome (latest) on Chromebook with truncated tag drop-downs …

Thank you. I’ve deferred a fix until after I do the internationalization work, but I won’t forget this issue.

@Thomas_Chuffart

@Scott_Sauyet

That palette was the very last thing I did on this, and it was a little hurried. I expected some issues. But I don’t see this one. I’m sure I’m looking in the wrong spot.

No it’s this spot exactly. Today I tested it on a mac at work and it’s correct as your screenshots, but at home on a PC it’s oddly not the same rendrerind, I will post a screenshot later.

If you can replicate this again, I would appreciate the screenshot. I haven’t been able to make it happen.

[Thomas_Chuffart]

here is the svreenshot from windows…I can’t read the contenet of the buttons…

[Scott_Sauyet]

Thank you. I’ll take a look. I expected to start the next phase tonight, but it’s probably not happening. This month is crazy.

I’ll get to it soon. Interesting that it doesn’t happen to me. What browser?

[Thomas_Chuffart]

I use opera on both computers…I will try with other browsers to compare.

[Scott_Sauyet]

@Thomas_Chuffart

I use opera on both computers

Opera… Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.

[TiddlyTitch]

@Scott_Sauyet

Opera… Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Shirley, your own Work is an Opera?

TT

[Thomas_Chuffart]

It is a browser bug, with other than Opera, no problem.

[Scott_Sauyet]

@Thomas_Chuffart

It is a browser bug

I would still like to fix this if I can. What version of Opera are you using on Windows? (I don’t have a Mac to test; but if you’re using Linux as well, let me know.)

[Thomas_Chuffart]

The bug is present on windows only, for the version it is the lastone, opera updates autamatically.