Crisoft Ricette

Today I got some time to work with FPDF and I created a new PDF output page. I still have to think about a way to include a stylesheet in it, so you can style the PDF output to match your website theme. I at least want to support different color schemes. I can’t upload the first layout yet, but I will do later. You can take a look at it and give me some feedback about it.

Using FPDF is very simple after a while. There is a way to do a header/footer for the pages and include pictures in the generated PDF. I’ll use that to include the recipe picture and maybe a link to the recipe page of your installation. One should be able to turn off the linking via the configuration, but for the moment I’m happy with a somewhat static generator.

Today I want to start a Logo Contest for Crisoft Ricette. As you may have noticed, this site is a default template of our blog system Wordpress and it’s not looking good. And there isn’t a logo in the wiki. I feel sorry for this and as a good project we should have a good logo. But I’m not a graphics designer and all my tries were a complete mess. But to give you a hint about what I want to achieve for Crisoft, here is a simple logo that I created by following a tutorial:

If you feel like helping me out of this situation, please write a comment. Thanks for you help!

Oh, and at the moment I try to figure my way through CakePHP, a nice framework for rapid application development. It really helps me with getting a feeling for a good application. I try to build a simple mockup of a web software supporting users, groups and a “web2.0″ feeling of editing, adding and deleting recipes.

Ok, there is a solution to the WYSIWYG editor in CVS now. I added a configuration option to turn it completly off. This is the best solution to incompability issues.

I’m very happy to see at least some contributions on the wiki. That really helps me going on with this project. Keep editing, guys!

It’s already late (well, too late to be awake), but I wanted to make some minor fixes and try to get a hack for tinyMCE going. I managed to add a snippet that disables the WYSIWYG editor on the insert recipe page, but only for the first textarea. The others aren’t working yet. But I guess I can fix this too.

Today I added some Screenshots to our wiki. As you may notice, there is some multi-language text in this screenshots. This is because I’m using the current development version and I’m still fiddling with the translation. The active style is called Slick and is just for demonstrating purposes. I hacked it from scratch in a quite minute to show the new theming ability of Crisoft Ricette.

Today I’m working on the installation scripts. I want them to follow the themeing - even if it’s only the default theme while installing - and I want them to work smoothly. Without warnings about “potentially dangerous passwords” if you use some special characters like I do.

There were some other issues with the installation and I want this problems to be removed before I release a new version. There was a silly error when the password was rejected and you were directed to the configuration form. Some values were resetted, some not. This was a major issue when I installed Crisoft Ricette the first time - I was so irritated that I was just a step before deleting everything.

Guess what: Crisoft Ricette got a Wiki now! If you want to contribute or work with us on the future of the project, please register yourself and start editing.

In the next days there will be a lot of changes in all sections of the new wiki. I try to create some pages for bug reports and feature requests and - of course - some development hints like a coding style and a place to paste all useful PHP snippets we could us.
For me, the wiki should take the place of our Sourceforge project page because I think that is not useable for the average user who is only interested in our recipe management software. And he doesn’t want a full-features SF account to play with, just to file a bug report or suggest a feature. So he should go to the wiki instead and just edit a page to submit his comments. Like this weblog it should be easy to use and everyone should  be able to post something.

As always, feel free to comment and give me some feedback. Oh, and you’d be glad to hear the the translation makes good progress and it will be finished soon. Right after finishing the translation stuff, I’ll go for some new features.

After browsing through the CVS and reading some old docs, I want to let you as a user of Crisoft Ricette know why I decided to re-inserting GNU Gettext for internationalization of the software. There are several reasons for me to use Gettext for the language settings.

First of all, it is much more flexible than the previously used constants stored in a text file. I’ve translated the text file before and it was very unclear, which of the constants was used at which place in the application. I had to check the english translation each time I wanted to translate a constant. I had to get the name of the constant, jump over to the english file, look up the constant and try to translate the english sentence into my german language file. With Gettext this should be a single step.

But that’s not the most important part. For you as a user of our favorite recipe management software, it’s not important how the translation is created - it’s important that it works. And even more important: You want text that is meaningful.

And that was the problem with the constants: They are constant. You can’t insert a generated value (generated by the php backend)  at a variable position of your translation. The developer had to put it at the start or the end of the constant message. While translating the file into german language I had to construct strange sentences just to match this pattern. And here comes Gettext again: I’ll glue gettext into the source code in a way that allows the developer AND the translator to give the generated values (like recipe names or error messages) a variable position.

I want Gettext to help me (as the developer) to easily add output messages and help you (as the user/administrator) to get meaningful error or status messages. And I think Crisoft is on a good way to reach both of this needs. With help of our new development member, DrSweety, we hopefully can reach the next step of development soon.
Please, feel free to comment on my posts using the comment system of this weblog. Soon there will be a Wiki available that let you easily create feature requests or just discussion pages about Crisoft. If you really want to help us improve the software, help us with feedback, feedback and more feedback.

A few days ago there was a support request regarding the CVS and I replied in the support tracker shortly. But I want to make it clear that the CVS is NOT a production version - it should be considered as a highly unstable version, with a lot of changes going on and maybe it is not even functional if you check it out in the middle of a development step.

So if you want to install our recipe mangement software Crisoft Ricette, please download the latest stable release from our project page at SourceForge.

As you might have noticed, there is a new developer aboard: DrSweety. I think this will improve the progress of our loved project and we can bring the project up to the next level. Today we chatted about our next edits and the way we want to share the work and I think we can smoothly go on with my plans on GNU Gettext and XHTML/CSS support.

May the source be with you, DrSweety!