By SteffenL on

I finally got around to starting my personal cooking website, SteffensDinners.com, and beginning to write down and publish my favorite recipes. The plan is to add recipes and photos over time and turn the site into my personal virtual cookbook.

The site uses Drupal 5.2 with an Andreas01-based theme and a bunch of additional modules:
Alinks, Amazon tools and Amazon filter for book links, Adsense, CCK, Captcha, Image, Img_assist and Meta tags. I customized some of the modules.

I chose Drupal after watching, trying and evaluating a number of free content management systems over the last two years. For me it is is a clear winner because of the modularity, extensibility, logical code structure and relatively simple but powerful user (and management) interface.

-- Steffen

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

lionheart8’s picture

lionheart8 commented

Quite nice, the site & the recipes!

I almost thought you are using the recipe module [www.drupal.org/project/recipe], which am experimenting with & quite like. Since you dont include it among the modules used (or it is one of those you customized?), I assume you are not, but you all the same find a nice way to present your stuff. :)
For pictures I use the node_images module.

SteffenL’s picture

SteffenL commented

Thanks!

I experimented with the recipe module and found it a bit too restrictive for what I had in mind. It allows only one flat ingredient list per recipe with no possibility for structural markup (e.g. for sub-recipes like the Blackening Spice ingredients in the Tuna recipe).

The other restriction I found are measurements, units and conversions. I like to give amounts in both metric and American standard units - not supported by the recipe module. Auto-conversion with appropriate rounding-off would be my preference, but that's not completely trivial because the precision required for the conversion depends on the recipe (for many recipes it's OK to say 1lb = 500g, but some recipes need higher precision). And there is the problem of preferred weight vs. volume units.

A third reason for not using it is that I just prefer to write markup ;-)

I'm currently looking into creating a filter module that would allow ingredient macros and sensible auto-conversion by specifying a tolerance, combining the advantages of markup and and ingredient database ... but that will take a while.

-- Steffen

SteffenL’s picture

SteffenL commented

It's been a long time since my last post and until about two months ago, I only made minor changes to the design of Steffen's Dinners and focused mainly on adding content.

Then, in early June, I decided to upgrade the site to Drupal 6 and replace the outdated and very narrow Andreas01-based theme
by something wider and more flexible. So I first brought up a test site, copied the database and brought up the Drupal core modules
and all the modules needed for displaying the images (image, img_assist, etc.). The next step was to find and adapt a new theme - after a lot
of experimenting, I decided to adapt Framework - very straightforward. Back in June, a few essential modules (e.g. Alinks) were not yet available for Drupal 6, but thanks to Coder quickly hacking the missing modules to work with Drupal 6 was really easy. I also had to port forward a few local modifications that I had made to modules in Drupal 5.

What do you think of the result?

-- Steffen