Hi all. The Cookbook app is terrific - and I was able to set up a shared folder after a little searching. I have some concerns/questions but the main issue right now is that, when using a mobile Android browser (Firefox/Fennec or Chrome) the left side pane of Cookbook does NOT appear at all. This means the “Create Recipe” and “Download Recipe From URL” options are unavailable. I have noticed on desktop browsers that the left side disappears when the available window / viewport is not wide enough.
This is a pity, because otherwise the web site itself would work fine as a mobile “app” for using from a phone. Of the plugins I’ve enabled, Cookbook is the only one with this disappearing sidebar issue - the others have an upper left “hamburger” button that opens a left pane as needed.
Could someone please offer any advice? Thank you in advance.
(I have tried the available Android apps for Cookbook but one crashes and the other has an upload function that doesn’t seem to work for me.)
As one of the maintainers of the cookbook app I am very interested in your feedback. I tried on one instance with my mobile phone just now. There, the hamburger is there as expected.
What version of NC and cookbook are you using right now?
There is a massive overhaul of the ui planned but this might take a few days until finished. If there are concerns for future changes ui-wise, now would be a good time to articulate and identify them.
Thank you, Christian, for your very fast reply! (I saw so many unanswered “new questions” here so I really appreciate it.) It’s great to hear that it works for you; my Fennec Android desktop shortcut would effectively turn this into an app once it’s working for me.
I was afraid you would ask that.
Unfortunately I’m using a pretty old version of NextCloud; I would have blamed this right away, except the other NextCloud modules are in fact behaving well for me. Nextcloud Hub II (23.0.3). Cookbook version is 0.9.13.
I would have to do a bunch of updates to my VPS first to support the latest, including PHP and MariaDB.
So I apologize to you if this is really a non-issue.
While I have your attention, though, perhaps I can ask some other items?
Any way to do a mass import rather than passing one URL at a time? One of the main sources we’d like to use is NYTimes Cooking. (A flat file import of multiple URLs would be fine, as I expect dealing with the “recipe box” functions of multiple sites would be too much to expect of an independent application like yours.)
Any plan for sharing functionality (within NextCloud and/or externally, perhaps via built in NextCloud long sharing URLs)? For now I’ve used NextCloud folder sharing to use the same Recipe folder for two internal Cookbook users.
Not sure but this may be a Unicode question - the first recipe I tried importing resulted in text like “If you've ever seen a copycat recipe for KFC Coleslaw” (codes instead apostrophes). Would this be rectified once I upgrade, or is this really the recipe web site’s problem?
The same recipe imported the ingredients fine but completely omitted the instructions right beneath them. (I was able to copy/paste from the HTML source.) I imagine this is simply a common problem when sites have poor schema.org compliance?
Is there documentation on the overall features? For example, I note preparation time, cooking time, and calories sometimes getting filled in even when I don’t see them on the source recipe page. If you’re using other means to get the info (a calorie DB or something) I’d be curious about how.
The recipe ingredient checkmarking is cool, and seems tailor made to integrate with a “pantry contents” and/or shopping list feature. Are those in the works?
Any plans for additional list display options? For example, list without photos, nested by groups/categories, ordered by mealtime, etc. I suppose the existing Category functionality might allow mealtime categorization?
Similarly, possible ability to multiselect recipes for mass operations (deletes, moves, categorization)?
I’ve seen this discussed somewhere else, and it’s not that important for me, but any new ability for multiple photos and/or other images?
Again, my apologies if much of this is already present in your latest versions. I’ve only just started using your software so am at the “newbie” stage. Thank you for such a nice piece of work.
As of is quite late and I am tired, just a quick answer here, more details are coming soon…
The majority of issues you mentioned are just discussed. We need to rework the UI in order to allow for all the features. Once done, we can start to implement things one by one. I would guess that 60% is already on the roadmap or worked on, min.
Related to NC 23: I have to check that combination but it should work.
sorry for the long delay. I was a bit busy in my daily job and abroad on the weekend.
Related to your original question:
You are partially lucky, I am having a similarly old installation (NC 23.0.3 as well). However, I found the latest version of cookbook should be 0.9.19. Is there a reason, you did not update to the latest version available (at least from the cookbook)?
Related to your questions/suggestions:
Currently, there is a major UI rework on its way. Actually, your point is already part of the mockup for this change:
Yeah, the sharing using a folder is the current state of the art but somehow also a workaround. The sharing is planned (#120 and #392) and considered. With some upcoming changes in the DB we will prepare for such features which is currently not directly possible.
Can you share the recipe URL? I know that quite some sites have malfuncional JSON code that we fail to parse as a result. I would like to see if the page has some bug or if we need to fix something.
Anyways, the parser might get an overhaul as well which might change the game as well.
Yeah, this is the same answer as above. I can have a look at the page if I have an URL. Feel free to add issues on Github in such cases as this allows us to track issues easily.
Unfortunately, there is mainly the CHANGELOGS. With the upcoming NC 29 there is a user-centric changelog as well but we did not yet use it (and I am unsure if we will use it intensively).
The times and the nutrition information might be imported from a foreign page. They serve this information ideally as part of the schema.org JSON file. We are not querying any third party databases or such.
A shopping list (#460) is in the issues. There was recently a discussion with another user who writes a dedicated shopping list app. The idea is to integrate the apps together (eventually with a meal planner) to create ingredient shopping lists. For now, we are falling back to allow to copy the ingredients to the clipboard for pasting into a MD file.
A complete stock management is not planned ATM. I would link here grocy as an example. Maybe in the future (if managed to iron out most of the issues so far), we can think of this . I put it in the issues #2220.
This is getting more interesting. With the mentioned UI update, the list of recipes will change the style a bit (but not yet finished):
Currently, there is no mealtime categorization, although I thought I read something like this somewhere I do not find right now. The idea was a bit more advanced to allow filtering for tags, categories, and other meta data (like rating, time, ingredients etc). it is not yet done and not even designed visually. We wil have to come up with something nice there.
Yeah, I see the point. There is already #2065 present. Which covers part of your comment. The UI might bring another option (similar to the files app to select recipes bz checking them) and operate on them in bulk. Not yet completely defined but should be doable.
Yes, it is planned (#443, #324 and eventually #315). Again, it needs some major change in the backend to handle the files. The rework of the backend will prepare this as well.
I hope I managed to address all of your points so far. If you have more questions or concerns, feel free to come back!
