After several months of development, planning, redesigns, a couple full rewrites, and more than a good couple late nights debugging, I'm pleased to share that The Baker's Archive is now live on my website.
While the project is still quite far from complete, I think it has reached an important enough milestone that the core platform can now be deployed and begin sharing recipes.
Why Build The Baker's Archive?
I'm mostly known for really liking bread, and beyond that, baking in general, and so over time with the hundreds of recipes that I've collected and baked from various books, websites, community projects, and historical sources.
One problem with all of these recipes is that it is often difficult to organise, and even harder to preserve them. Information is fragmented across dozens of websites, all with their own formats, and valuable sources and amazing recipes can just disappear without warning more than you would realise.
The Baker's Archive is my personal method to a better solution. It is a structured archive where I can store, document, and properly attribute the recipes that I love.
What Has Been Completed?
This current version that is deployed includes:
- Archive management
- Recipe management
- Author records
- Source tracking
- Licensing information
- Tag and category systems
- Search integration
- Website navigation and browsing
All of this is handled under the hood with a custom Odoo module that replaces the traditional blog-style content (like this) with recipe focuses data structures.
A lot of work has gone into making it flexible enough so that it can support everything from simple breads, to quite detailed and extravagant recipes.
The Current Focus
Now that the platform itself is online, the next challenge is content.
As enjoyable as the development process has been, a recipe archive without recipes is just an empty shell and so my current focus is going to be building up the collection.
My goal is to steadily add new recipes, improve metadata quality, and try to expand my own range of baking skills with some different traditional recipes included.
This will include:
- Bread recipes
- Cakes and desserts
- Pastries
- Historical recipes
- Openly licenses recipe collections
What's Next?
There are still a whole lot of features planned for future releases.
- Better recipe rendering and UI
- Enhanced searching with more indexable criteria
- Additional archive views
- Import tools for large recipe collections
It will continue to develop, but like bread, the workload will likely double after a good proof.