Cucumbertown’s RecipeWriter v2.0 is Coming Soon!
An early preview of the new Editor featuring scheduling, recommendations, linking ingredients and much more…
It’s been over a year since we released the RecipeWriter, our recipe creation interface. A lot has happened since then on Cucumbertown, the most significant of which has been our evolution to a food blogging platform. Between the tons of architectural and design challenges behind the scenes, we had to reprioritise the RecipeWriter and it did bear the heavy brunt of adapting to a lot of stuff it was never designed for.
Over the past couple of months, we were immersed in designing the new editor with all the feedback that we took from you. We also revisited its design genesis. While the basic idea — to provide an effortless recipe creation interface is still at its focus, we realised a lot needs to be changed conceptually. This will the be most significant upgrade since the first version. It’s going to be a mammoth engineering task and we’d love your feedback as we progress.
Updated toolkit menu
The new toolkit menu is docked to the top of the page, always accessible and requires fewer clicks and offers a more user friendly mobile interaction. Keyboard shortcuts to each of the tools will be available for the pros. The contextual formatting options upon selection of text blocks remain unchanged.
The tools available — Add image, embed media (more media supports coming up including embedding of Tweets and Instagram posts!), add recipe block, add product recommendations and more!
Image attributions
Advanced image attribution features are moved under a pull-down menu. Some noted features include alt text, image captions and hyperlinking of images.
Recommendations
We rolled out affiliate product embedding a few weeks ago which lets bloggers define a list of products that they would like to embed inside the recipe posts. New updates to the editor makes it possible to place the units anywhere within the post.
Improved recipe blocks
Another significant upgrade — the insert recipe block option which lets you position your ingredient blocks anywhere within your post.
This also means that you can include multiple recipe blocks within the same post and better structure your post. A wider set of recipe properties are also defined for those who need far more granular classification of their recipe data.
Other significant changes include;
- Group instructions — One of the most requested feature is now under development.
- Hyperlinking Ingredients— Add external links to ingredient names and instructions
- Better visualisation and control over parsed ingredient structure
Publishing
Some significant improvements are there in the publishing flow.
- You can preview posts on your blog layout before publishing.
- Schedule your posts for a later date
- Define cover images for your posts when it is shared on popular social networking sites and much more…
What do you think? Don’t forget to share your feedback, the good, the bad and the ugly :).
