Cookifed v0.2.0

Today, we’re shipping the second release of Cookifed, the federated cooking manager and preparations planner!

This is the first release since we opened registrations, and you’ve been trying things out, finding rough edges and telling us about them. So we have been mostly listening to your feedback, and fixing the issues you reported, as well as the ones we found out as the platform was being more used.

That makes most of this release as usability improvements and bug fixes, to make usage smoother.

There are a couple things that stand out and we want to explicitly emphasize though.

Improved search

We have rethought the search UI to better match what folks actually want to find.

• Recipes first. By default, a search now only looks through recipes.
• Your language. By default, you only get results written in the language you configured.
• Relevance first. By default, results are now sorted by relevance, so the best match is at the top.

All those defaults can be overridden within a specific search of course. So you can change a search to look for recipes in German, even though your UI is in English.

Trends

We now build trends: the recipes, preparations and accounts that people are cooking and sharing.

You’ll see them in a couple of places:

• The guest homepage can display trends, with a custom tag.
• Your timeline used to be an empty page when you had nobody to follow yet. Now, it shows trending recipes instead.

Both our instances, Cookifed.net and cuisine.social already show trending recipes on their homepage.

Changelog

Want the full list of everything that changed? Head over to the changelog.

What’s next

Our next release will go deeper under the hood: we’re planning to improve the ActivityPub signature process.

Right now, it’s rather heavy, and loads a lot of remote data on every request, most of which isn’t needed. It’s a large refactoring with very small user-facing changes, but a big performance impact!

We also want to introduce recipe metadata. You’ll be able to add any information you need to a recipe: that it’s great in a specific season, that it’s vegetarian, or anything else that matters to you.

Come help us!

We are a volunteer-built project, and we always welcome more hands. Whether you write code or not, there is much to do.

The best way to get started is to come talk to us on matrix, or follow along on the fediverse.

We also always welcome any feedback!