WP Recipe Maker 9.5.0

We just released the very best version of WP Recipe Maker up until today: version 9.5.0. Read on for the highlights and a full changelog or update right away!

Chicory In-Recipe Ads and Shoppable Button

We’re excited to announce our new integration with Chicory, a solution trusted by top food publishers, including Food Network, The Pioneer Woman, and Delish, that combines the best of contextual advertising with recipe shoppability.

By installing Chicory, you can monetize your content with contextual, in-recipe ads that make sense for your food site and offer your audience a seamless shoppable experience at 70+ integrated retailers, including Walmart, Instacart, and Kroger.

Getting started is easy. Simply enable the integration on the WP Recipe Maker > Settings > Integrations page. To set up earnings payment, please complete this registration form.

From there, you’ll have the ability to turn on Chicory’s in-recipe ads and their shoppable button.

Chicory’s in-recipe ads will appear within and below your recipes’ ingredient lists, allowing you to secure earnings from relevant grocery advertisers. The ads are contextually targeted to your recipes, which means they’ll only provide your site visitors with relevant product recommendations. For example, a user may see an ad for chocolate chips within a chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Chicory’s Shoppable Recipe Button will appear below your recipes’ ingredient lists, allowing users to cart the ingredients for your recipes at their retailer of choice. This functionality enhances the value of your site for users, increasing the likelihood that they will return to your recipes for inspiration and meal planning.

Chicory makes it easy for creators to start monetizing their recipes today. Check out the integration on our demo site.

Only available in the United States at the moment.

Recipe Reports

In the menu you’ll find the WP Recipe Maker > Reports page with two brand new reports you can generate: the Recipe Interactions Report and Recipe Collections Usage Report.

For the interactions report, you need to make sure Recipe Analytics have actually been enabled, as these are the interactions shown in the report. Once the report is generated you’ll get an overview of all recipes on your site and how many interactions they get.

The information is given as average per day (since the recipe date) and for different time periods until today. This can be used to see which of your recipes are actually the most popular.

At the top you can also limit it to the print interaction only, so that you can see how many times a particular recipe has been printed.

For websites using the Recipe Collections feature, the usage report is another great tool to learn more about your users and recipes. It gives you an overview of how many of your users have used the feature, and how many collections and items are being created and used.

Apart from this general overview, there is also a list of your recipes and how many times they can be found in a collection.

Take note that this report can only take logged in users into account. Depending on your settings, the recipe collections feature can also be used by guests, but that information is not accessible for reporting.

Singular and Plural for Ingredient Units

On the WP Recipe Maker > Manage > Recipe Fields > Ingredient Units page you can now find a new “Plural” column. This allows you to define the plural version of any of your units and use the correct version when adjusting servings or generating a shopping list.

For example, if your recipe has “1 clove garlic”, it will automatically become “2 cloves garlic” when a visitor doubles the ingredients.

Internally, large parts of the WP Recipe Maker frontend code were rewritten to make this feature possible and simplify dynamic changes to the recipe card. This now also makes it easier for developers to build their own UI for adjustable servings or unit conversion.

To follow Google’s guidelines and improve the integrity of the rating system, any rating (even without comment text) has been visible on the page since our previous updates. Because we needed a quick solution, we opted for showing those ratings in between the regular comments. This was a temporary solution to make sure visitors can always see when a rating was given and by whom (even if that’s just “Anonymous”).

As to not clutter the comment section we now have a new “Show as aggregate summary” display option, which can be enabled on the WP Recipe Maker > Settings > Star Ratings > User Ratings without Comment Text page.

When using “Show as aggregate summary” for the display setting, user ratings without comment text will not be shown between the other comments anymore. Instead, you’ll get a new line above or below the comment input form that repeats the rating of your recipe and then also allows visitors to click through and find details on all ratings that were given.

When a visitor clicks on “1,266 ratings without comment” in this example, a modal will pop up display all of the details for those ratings.

This way, you don’t get an endless list of comments but do still maintain the visibility and transparency on where those ratings are actually coming from.

There’s also a new “User Ratings Modal” block available in the Template Editor, allowing you to add a link or button that opens up the modal for visitors to leave a rating. This shortcode can be used inside or outside of the recipe card to make it as easy as possible to get ratings.

On the User Ratings settings page you can find a new “Open Modal through URL Parameter” setting as well. By setting a parameter here, you can link to a recipe using a specific query parameter to immediately open up the modal. For example: https://demo.wprecipemaker.com/user-ratings/?rate

Full Changelog

We highlighted just a few of the new features/improvements/fixes above. Below you can find the other changes in version 9.5.0. Check out our documentation for a full history.

WP Recipe Maker Premium 9.5.0

Feature: Singular and plural for ingredient units
Feature: Use unit singular and plural in shopping list
Feature: Set servings and unit system through recipe JS object
Feature: Report on Recipe Collections Usage
Feature: Remember “Add to Collection” click that happened before logging in
Feature: Show ratings without comment text as aggregated summary
Feature: Button or link to open user ratings modal
Feature: Immediately open rating modal if specific URL parameter is set
Improvement: Settings to finetune automatic approval of user ratings
Improvement: Compatibility with Titan Anti-spam & Security plugin
Improvement: Better compatibilty with Antispam Bee for user ratings
Improvement: Styling of user ratings modal in some themes
Improvement: Consistent use of thousands separator when adjusting servings
Improvement: Consistent use of thousands separator in shopping list
Improvement: Keyboard accessibility for collections feature