The foodious Toolchain: The Ingredient Editor
Tue, May 22nd

The ingredient editor was never intended to be shown to non-site-admins, so it may appear to be a little rough around the edges (though it works like a champ). It's worth noting that anything that appears in yellow is "admin-only", meaning, it's intended only to be see/used by a site administrator.

This editor has a lot going on, and so I've broken it out into three sections (thus the three images below). The list of capabilities shown here includes:

  1. The ability to merge one ingredient with another.
  2. The ability to mark an ingredient as "reviewed".
  3. The ability to delete an ingredient and/or it's nutrition.
  4. A quicksearch for existing foodious ingredients.
  5. A quicksearch for USDA nutritional data.
  6. The ability to create a conversion for an ingredient, or edit an existing conversion.
  7. A paginated list of all recipes that contain the ingredient.
  8. The ability to edit the name, type, alias, etc of an ingredient.
  9. The ability to edit the classification data for an ingredient.
  10. The ability to map an ingredient to it's USDA nutritional data.
  11. A list of "similar ingredients" (found using the ingredient alias).
  12. A list of "similar ingredient conversions" (also found using the ingredient alias).
  13. A nutritional data editor that includes the ability to edit the base amount and measurement.

The Core Tools (Of Which There Are Many)
The First Set Of Tools

These should be fairly self-explanatory. You can see buttons to review, merge, delete, and map ingredients.

The two quicksearches are Ing. Quick Search and Nutrition Quick Search. These tools help find duplicate ingredients (I try my best to normalize ingredients) as well as to quickly search USDA nutritional data.

The basic ingredient info allows an editor to set/change:

  • The name and plural name
  • The ingredient type
  • The ingredient alias which is used by search when an ingredient has a more common name than it's proper name.
  • Whether the ingredient is virtual and/or is a rollup
  • The ingredients like match, which is how we discover similar ingredients on the site.
  • The ingredients parent (ingredients on foodious are heirarchical

You can also see the paginated list of recipes that contain this ingredient, a list of measures that are used across the site for this ingredient, and any substitutions that have been made.

There are two sets of similar ingredients, one administrative in nature and one public-facing. The admin-specific matching is looser (so the list tends to be longer). This list is used to help keep the ingredient set normalized.


Classifications and Conversions
Classification and Conversions

You can see the set of classification checkboxes for each ingredient. These allow classifying ingredients based on diet and allergens. There's an additional tool that allows me to keep these consistent (it's called the Multi-Edit Tool). These can be tricky to determine because there can be quite a bit on controversy as to whether a given ingredient is considered to be paleo or not.

You can also see the existing conversions, as well as conversions for similar ingredients. These come in handy for ingredients like cheese and pasta, where it's important to keep the conversions consistent.


Search and Nutrition
Nutrition Editing

This editor is only used when I can't find the nutritional data for a given ingredient. E.g.: fenugreek seeds were tricky.

Sometimes, the best data comes directly from a product, and so this editor is where that data is entered into the system and then mapped to it's foodious ingredient. Other times, it comes from another country, so this tool is also used for that data.

The Whole Editor As a Single Image

If you want to see the entire ingredient editor as a single image, here's a link to a screen capture of garlic in the editor.

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