Download the PHP package ernestdefoe/recipes without Composer

Recipes for Flarum

Structured recipes in posts. A recipe card with ingredients that scale when the reader changes the servings, steps with one-click timers, a clean print view, and schema.org Recipe data so search engines can show it as a recipe.

Works with every editor a Flarum 2 forum can run: Flarum's own composer (plain, Markdown or BBCode), FoF Rich Text and Scribe.

What readers get

• Servings that scale the ingredients. Press + or − and every amount updates as a cook would write it: 1½ cups doubles to 3 cups, ⅓ cup becomes ⅔, metric amounts stay decimals in the reader's own format (1,5 kg on a German forum). Unit words follow the number, so 1 cup doubled reads 2 cups. A line with no amount (salt, to taste) is left alone.
• Timers. A step that says Bake for [25m] shows a 25 min button. One click starts it, the next pauses, and it beeps when it is done. It counts against the clock, so a background tab doesn't slow it down.
• Ticks. Every ingredient and step has a checkbox, so you can follow what is already in the bowl. Tap the line to tick it; ticked lines are struck through, and a ticked step's number becomes a check mark. Ticks are kept in the reader's own browser (guests too), stay on the same line when the servings change, survive a reload, and are forgotten after a day or as soon as the recipe is edited. Clear ticks unticks the lot. Printing leaves them out.
• Print. The print button prints just the recipe, at the servings the reader picked, with the page address underneath. Nothing else from the forum.
• Everything without JavaScript, too. The card is server-rendered HTML, so emails, feed readers and search engines see the whole recipe.

A recipe directory

Recipes in the sidebar opens a page listing every recipe on the forum as a card: photo, title, author, servings and time, linked to the post it lives in. Search it by name or filter it by tag. It lists only recipes the visitor is allowed to see, and the server sends it as plain links too, for search engines and readers without JavaScript.

Variants

Every recipe card has a Remix button. It opens the recipe form with a copy of the recipe to change, as a reply in the same discussion (the usual "I made it vegan" case) or as a discussion of its own. The new card says which recipe it is based on, with a link back, and the original lists its variants underneath, so you can follow the branches either way. Search engines get the link too, as schema.org isBasedOn.

Your own fields: protein, PHE, calories…

Every community counts something different. In the admin panel you define the numbers your recipes should carry, such as calories, protein, or the PHE someone on a PKU diet has to track, each with a label and a unit, dragged into the order you want.

For each field you choose whether its value is per serving, so it stays the same when a reader changes the servings, or for the whole recipe, so it scales with them. Values are shown exactly as entered, never rounded to a "nice" number. Link a field to a schema.org nutrition property (calories, protein, fat, carbohydrate, sugar, fibre, sodium…) and search engines get it, per serving, as the recipe's nutrition information. A field with no schema.org equivalent, like PHE, is shown on the card only.

What authors get

A Recipe button in the composer opens a form: title, servings, prep and cook times, an optional photo, a description, ingredients and steps (one per line).

• Amounts can be written however people write them: 2, 1 1/2, 1½, ½, 1.5, 1,5, 200g, 2–3.
• A line ending in a colon (For the sauce:) starts a group.
• [25m], [1h 30m] or [45s] in a step becomes a timer.

In Scribe and FoF Rich Text the recipe is a block you can select, drag and delete; double-click it, or press Edit, to change it. In the plain composer, put the cursor inside a recipe and press the button to edit it.

The composer preview shows the card as you type.

Photos

Drop a photo on the form, or choose one: JPEG, PNG or WebP up to 10 MB. The forum re-encodes it as WebP (at most 1600 px), which strips everything but the pixels, including a phone photo's location, and stores it under a random name in public/assets/recipes (or wherever a storage driver puts the ernestdefoe-recipes disk). Who may upload is the Upload recipe photos permission, Members by default. Uploads are limited to 10 a minute and 100 a day per member.

A photo that never makes it into a saved post is deleted after a day, by the daily recipes:prune-photos task (and whenever its uploader uploads again). A photo edited out of a recipe, or whose post is deleted, is deleted too, unless a variant still shows it.

Allow images from web addresses (in the extension's settings, on by default) keeps the old way of pasting an image's address. Turn it off and only uploaded photos are accepted: the address box disappears and the server refuses a recipe that links an image from another site when it is saved. Recipes posted before keep their images, and an edit or a remix may keep an image already shown on the forum; nothing is rewritten.

Writing one by hand

The form writes this, and you can too:

A variant adds based-on: 123, the post id of the original. Remix writes it for you. Your own fields are lines like protein: 6.5, using each field's key.

Recipe text is plain text: Markdown and BBCode inside a recipe are shown as written.

Search engines

The first post's recipe is published as a schema.org Recipe: name, image, description, author, date, yield, prep/cook/total times, ingredients and steps (groups become HowToSections). It is the only structured data Recipes adds, so it sits alongside FoF SEO and Waymark without repeating anything they publish. A recipe in a reply is not the page's recipe and is left out. A first post the visitor cannot see is never described.

Installation

Enable Recipes in the admin panel. If your community records numbers on its recipes, define them on the extension's page.

Recipes keeps a small index of where recipes are, so the directory and variant links never have to read every post. It is filled when the extension is enabled and kept current as posts are written, edited and deleted. If you ever restore posts from a backup or import them with a tool that bypasses Flarum, rebuild it:

With Scribe, the button joins the toolbar on its own unless you have arranged the toolbar by hand. Then it waits in the toolbar builder for you to place it.

Updating

Good to know

• A recipe written in Flarum's own composer opens as text if the forum later switches to Scribe, because Scribe edits HTML. Insert it again with the button.
• Unit singular/plural swapping knows English unit words; any other word is left exactly as written.

Requirements

• Flarum 2.0
• PHP 8.3+

Support

• Support forum: Recipes on ernestdefoe.online
• Flarum community: Recipes on discuss.flarum.org
• Bug reports: GitHub issues

Licence

MIT.