Very Active Plugin

  • We’ve been using this plugin on a large site for several years now. Here’s what I think.

    Pros:
    – This is the most actively maintained recipe plugin.
    – Support is quick
    – This plugin is bleeding edge in technology. It was first to support guided recipes, and always first to jump on feature introductions in schema markup.
    – The plugin is down to the bone customizable, and not just the visual aspect. For example in the step by step instructions, you can embed photos, or clips, or one long video with time markers. You can even link each recipe ingredient with a step.
    – This plugin is all in one. It packs a nutrition label (pro version), US to metric conversions, etc…
    – It’s the most popular recipe plugin
    – Lots of extras – additional How-to schema, roundups, etc…

    Cons:
    Internally, recipe cards are not natively built within Gutenberg. Instead, they are created as separate entities in parallel to a post. As a result there are several side effects to this.
    – Recipe Cards do not work with Revisions. You can roll back the changes to a post, but you cannot roll back changes to a recipe card.
    – Recipe Cards are incompatible with revision draft plugins (plugins that allow you to create a draft of a Published post before merging changes, i.e. Revision Manager TMC, Revisionize and PublishPress Revisions). The recipe card inside a draft post will override the published post, since it’s a shared entity.

    To be honest, I’m not sure if there are any recipe plugins that were able to overcome these limitations or if it’s even possible. But I do wonder if instead of creating a separate entity for a recipe card, it instead was inserted as a self-inclusive Gutenberg block (a purely technical speculation). I wonder if that would have been a better approach.

    Otherwise, if you’re seriously looking to jumpstart a recipe site. As of today, this should literally be your only choice.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Author Brecht

    (@brechtvds)

    Thank you for your review, I really appreciate it!

    We do actually have recipe revisions as well, but decoupled from the post revisions: https://help.bootstrapped.ventures/article/190-recipe-revisions

    So if there are changes to the recipe, you’d go through the WP Recipe Maker > Manage page instead. The reason is that technically recipes are their own custom post type and the regular post is indeed simply referencing the existing recipe.

    This makes it very easy to manage those recipes in one place (the manage page) and also offers a lot of flexibility for users that don’t want to include recipes into regular posts. But you’re definitely right that it can be confusing, for example when doing revisions.

    In the case of revision drafts I would recommend removing the recipe block from the new draft and adding it in again using the “Insert new from existing recipe” option. That way you’re making a copy of the old recipes that you can make changes to without affecting the original post.

    Let me know if you have any further questions or suggestions at all. Very valuable feedback!

    Thread Starter Timofey Drozhzhin

    (@drtimofey)

    @brechtvds I didn’t realize WPRM have their own revisions. Wouldn’t it be more intuitive to include a revision shortcut on WPRM block when editing a post. See example.

    Screen-Shot-2021-10-05-at-11-54-40-PM

    Also, I am sure you’ve already thought of this, but why not logging WPRM revision ID on post save? That way when a post rolls back, it loads the correct WPRM revision?

    Thx!

    Plugin Author Brecht

    (@brechtvds)

    The shortcut to revisions is an interesting idea. Will add that to the list.

    The problem with tying WPRM revisions to post revisions is that a recipe could be part of many posts. So rolling back 1 of those posts would then affect all the others as well.

    Thread Starter Timofey Drozhzhin

    (@drtimofey)

    @brechtvds just curious — why would a recipe ever need to be part of multiple posts? Wouldn’t that be considered a bad SEO practice, since it’s duplicate content?

    Plugin Author Brecht

    (@brechtvds)

    That is indeed not recommended. But it’s possible, so implementing revisions like this would lead to unexpected changes for people that are doing this.

    Thread Starter Timofey Drozhzhin

    (@drtimofey)

    @brechtvds IMHO it makes more sense to link WPRM block to one post at a time and integrate it with post revisions, but as you said it won’t be backwards compatible.

    In any way, thanks so much for breaking things down! It’s always good to understand things from your end.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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