Jekyll2016-11-30T17:48:48+00:00http://blog.growstuff.org//Growstuff’s BlogUpdates from GrowstuffRelease 162016-11-30T00:00:00+00:002016-11-30T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.growstuff.org/release-16<p>This one’s mostly to get a hotfix out for the planting page. If a planting had no planting date AND no finish date (but was marked finished), there were errors.</p>
<p>There are also a bunch of code cleanups.</p>This one’s mostly to get a hotfix out for the planting page. If a planting had no planting date AND no finish date (but was marked finished), there were errors.Release 15 is out the door2016-11-24T00:00:00+00:002016-11-24T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.growstuff.org/release-15<p>Here’s the big news:</p>
<p><strong>You can now sign up and log in using Facebook!</strong></p>
<p>The maps are also working again (yay!), we have links to OpenFarm for better open data integration, and we fixed where the harvest thumbnails link.</p>
<p><strong>Plus</strong>: developer Brenda has started work on an app, and for that made improvements to the sign-in/sign-out API.</p>
<p>Give it a try!</p>Here’s the big news:Release 142016-08-22T00:00:00+00:002016-08-22T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.growstuff.org/release-14<p>We just pushed Release 14 live. We’ve made a few small visual improvements and added some convenience links.</p>
<h2 id="features">Features</h2>
<ul>
<li>On harvests without a photo of their own, show a photo of the crop itself</li>
<li>Add links to Gardenate</li>
<li>Add links to eBay for buying seeds</li>
<li>Improve the navigation bar layout on mobile with a clearer search box</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="bug-fixes">Bug fixes</h2>
<ul>
<li>Mark as finished from the garden list used to get the wrong plant and won’t any more</li>
</ul>We just pushed Release 14 live. We’ve made a few small visual improvements and added some convenience links.Release 132016-07-19T00:00:00+00:002016-07-19T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.growstuff.org/release-13<p>We just pushed Release 13 live. These are just about all tech improvements. The Bootstrap alerts mean you should be seeing some more informative colors on the website, though.</p>
<ul>
<li>Fixed broken emails</li>
<li>Minor gem upgrades</li>
<li>Build process improvements: Check PR author is in CONTRIBUTORS.md under Travis, Check for “forgot to commit Gemfile.lock” in CI, Block external URLs in feature tests</li>
<li>Add support for Bootstrap alert types</li>
<li>README file update for Freenode IRC</li>
</ul>We just pushed Release 13 live. These are just about all tech improvements. The Bootstrap alerts mean you should be seeing some more informative colors on the website, though.Release 122016-06-17T00:00:00+00:002016-06-17T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.growstuff.org/release-12<p>We just pushed Release 12 live. For a while now, emails haven’t been working,
and that was causing server errors on anything that generates emails – user registration,
messaging, commenting, etc.</p>
<p>Having all those things down at once was, we’re sure, very frustrating, so we’re very happy to have it working again!</p>
<h2 id="features">Features</h2>
<ul>
<li>front page now shows edited timestamp if relevant on posts</li>
<li>better Facebook previews</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="tech-improvements">Tech Improvements</h2>
<ul>
<li>Updated gems</li>
<li>Switched to SparkPost from Mandrill for email sending</li>
<li>Translatable plurals throughout the site</li>
<li>Stopped maintaining a patch on a third-party library</li>
<li>Added Code Climate, so we can work toward clean, friendly code as we go</li>
<li>Test coverage calculations are now more accurate (and 20% higher!)</li>
</ul>We just pushed Release 12 live. For a while now, emails haven’t been working,
and that was causing server errors on anything that generates emails – user registration,
messaging, commenting, etc.New maintainers for Growstuff2016-06-13T00:00:00+00:002016-06-13T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.growstuff.org/new-maintainers-for-growstuff<p>Hi all,</p>
<p>You may have noticed that things have been very quiet with Growstuff for the last year or so. This is primarily because I have been dealing with some serious health issues that left me unable to manage Growstuff, or even to spend much time online, since early 2015. Things are looking somewhat better these days, but I’ve realised that I’m not going to be able to give Growstuff the attention it deserves. The time has come to step back officially and put the project in the hands of people who can take better care of it than I currently can.</p>
<p>Miles, Cesy, and Maco, three of the developers on the Growstuff project, will be taking it over from here on out. All three are experienced open source contributors, and Miles and Cesy were two of the very first coders to join Growstuff in 2012. I will be shutting down Growstuff-the-business (which was founded in the hope of being able to pay people to work on the project, but sadly didn’t pan out) and the open source project will become a community-run one. I know that Miles, Cesy, and Maco will do a brilliant job, continuing to build the Growstuff platform as well as maintaining Growstuff’s traditions as a supportive and welcoming open source community. I wish them all the best.</p>
<p>For any future enquiries about Growstuff, please contact them at maintainers@growstuff.org</p>
<p>Thank you for supporting Growstuff.</p>
<p>Regards,</p>
<p>Alex Bayley</p>Hi all,Release 112016-06-01T00:00:00+00:002016-06-01T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.growstuff.org/release-11<p>Our next release has just gone live.</p>
<h2 id="new-features">New features</h2>
<ul>
<li>Crop approval flash alert for wranglers upon sign in</li>
<li>Added Bootstrap accessibility plugin</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="technical-improvements">Technical improvements</h2>
<ul>
<li>Removed redundant code from our crowdfunder last year</li>
<li>Remove warnings and debugging puts from rspec output</li>
<li>Add capybara-screenshot to assist with feature testing</li>
<li>Use standardized & translateable strings for the photo show page</li>
<li>Stop hard-coding strings for pagination</li>
<li>Refactor photo controller create for readability</li>
<li>Updated Gemfile.lock for Code Climate inclusion</li>
<li>Add code climate to README</li>
<li>Add config/factory_girl.rb so that rspec doesn’t fail with a confusing ‘Could not find mapping for #<Member…’ error. This happens when you make significant changes to a controller then re-run rspec. It’s a Factory Girl / rspec caching issue. It’s only a problem for devs running rspec locally, not Travis.</li>
<li>Precompile css and js with sass</li>
<li>Moving database.yml and adding gitignore to make it easier for different dev setups</li>
<li>Issue 690 Switch on CMS and remove old files</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="bug-fixes">Bug fixes</h2>
<ul>
<li>Aligned links properly on “Forgot password” page, “Resend confirmation” and “Resend unlock” pages</li>
<li>Add a location not set layout so that your profile page still looks sensible if you don’t have a location set</li>
<li>Display one line of description in harvest card, then go to ellipsis</li>
<li>Capture originalText from the button that’s been clicked, not from the array of all possible date-picker buttons.</li>
<li>Make seed card heading link to seed page and add owner link.</li>
<li>Set background color on autocomplete dropdown.</li>
<li>Swap over to having “(Optional)” (or translation) after optional form elements rather than using placeholder text, so it’s better for screenreaders</li>
<li>Clip long text in definition lists within panels</li>
<li>Improve nearby places links</li>
<li>Improve the styling of a planting to be more like the other card-layouts</li>
<li>Darken navbar item text when it opens (and the background turns light) to make it more readable</li>
<li>Fix mailchimp newsletter subscriptions - this won’t take effect until we have MailChimp working again, but when we do, it will allow us to send out newsletters to everyone.</li>
<li>Fix “duplicated key: :class” warning in HAML code</li>
</ul>Our next release has just gone live.Release 9 Going Live2016-05-16T00:00:00+00:002016-05-16T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.growstuff.org/release-9-going-live<p>It’s been quiet for a long time, and I suspect most people are following in other channels, but just to let everyone know, we’re about to deploy Release 9, with a few new features and a lot of bug fixes.</p>It’s been quiet for a long time, and I suspect most people are following in other channels, but just to let everyone know, we’re about to deploy Release 9, with a few new features and a lot of bug fixes.This Week in Growstuff2015-02-08T00:00:00+00:002015-02-08T00:00:00+00:00http://blog.growstuff.org/this-week-in-growstuff<p>Here’s a roundup of what’s been happening in the world of Growstuff over the last week or so.</p>
<h2 id="our-new-advisory-board">Our new advisory board</h2>
<p>In case you missed it, the other day we <a href="http://blog.growstuff.org/2015/02/04/announcing-growstuffs-new-advisory-board/">announced</a> Growstuff’s new advisory board, made up of experts in innovation, social enterprise, open data, and more.</p>
<p>Read more about Growstuff’s new advisors on our <a href="http://wiki.growstuff.org/index.php/Team#Advisors">team page</a>.</p>
<h2 id="do-you-like-like-likes">Do you, like, like likes?</h2>
<p>We’ve been talking for ages about letting people “like” photos and posts on Growstuff, and how we could use that to surface more useful information, better pictures for crops, and so on.</p>
<p>This week we’ve been discussing <a href="http://talk.growstuff.org/t/liking-posts-and-pics/217">“liking” posts and pics</a> and especially whether adding tags like “Helpful”, “Funny”, or “Informative” to a like can help us show better information to our members and visitors.</p>
<p>Got an opinion? <a href="http://talk.growstuff.org/t/liking-posts-and-pics/217">Weigh in on Growstuff Talk</a>.</p>
<h2 id="development-news">Development news</h2>
<p>First up, congrats to Maco, who became a committer this week. This means she can merge other people’s code into the main Growstuff project. Stop by the discussion forum and <a href="http://talk.growstuff.org/t/maco-is-our-newest-committer-o/212/">congratulate her</a> :)</p>
<p>We’re working towards <a href="http://talk.growstuff.org/t/release-8-planning-thread/193">Release 8</a> which means we’ll be updating the Growstuff website with a bunch of new features, bugfixes, and backend improvements toward the end of the week.</p>
<p>We need help testing new features! If you’ve got some time to spare this week, <a href="http://talk.growstuff.org/c/development/testing">join our testing team</a> and try out some of our new features, including:</p>
<p>-Tracking more information about your seed collection, including whether your seeds are heirloom or hybrid, organic, and how many days the seed packet says it’ll be until harvest.
- The ability to search crops by their scientific and alternate names (including in the autosuggest when you’re planting, harvesting, etc)
- Photos of your garden as a whole (not just individual plantings and harvests)
- A massively improved “request new crops” process
- A new content management system (CMS) making it easier for us to update the various pages linked in the site’s footer</p>
<h2 id="growstuff-gatherings">Growstuff gatherings</h2>
<p>Last Wednesday several of us were at <strong>Open Knowledge Workshop in Melbourne, Australia</strong>, where Alex gave a talk about Growstuff and open food data. Here are a few tweets to give you a taste of the event:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>tonight’s <a href="https://twitter.com/OKFNau">@OKFNau</a> meetup’s 1st time I’ve come across <a href="https://twitter.com/growstufforg">@growstufforg</a>, which is exactly my kind of thing. Reinforces why I participate in @OKFN</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>— Cobi Smith (@cobismith) <a href="https://twitter.com/cobismith/status/562876347383832576">February 4, 2015</a></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Remember: <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/opendata?src=hash">#opendata</a> doesn’t always mean open government data (PSI) or scientific research data – citizen collected data counts too!</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>— Open Knowledge Aus (<a href="https://twitter.com/OKFNau">@OKFNau</a>) <a href="https://twitter.com/OKFNau/status/562880753370148864">February 4, 2015</a></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Fascinating use of open data as it applies to <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/openfood?src=hash">#openfood</a> on http://t.co/6bCGu5K1ds These are the UI wireframe dreams http://t.co/rsZj8eJgnZ</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>— datakid23 (@datakid23) <a href="https://twitter.com/datakid23/status/562876531748651008">February 4, 2015</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This week (and every 2nd Tuesday of the month) we’ll be at Melbourne’s Ruby Hack Night. Drop by and say hi!</p>
<h2 id="from-around-the-web">From around the web</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://realfoodmedia.org/vote/">Real Food Media Contest</a>: watch 10 short films about food, and vote by Feb 27th</li>
<li><a href="http://www.littlemountainhaven.com/reasons-to-grow-your-own-food/">Top reasons to grow your own food</a> (Little Mountain Haven)</li>
<li><a href="http://sourceable.net/developing-a-thirst-for-urban-agriculture/#">Developing a thirst for urban agriculture</a> (Sourceable) “The Australian dream of a quarter-acre block is now becoming a distant memory.”</li>
<li>Sustainable agriculture on one of the world’s remotest islands: <a href="https://www.pipmagazine.com.au/hidden-garden-sustainable-farm/">Hidden Garden Sustainable Farm, Christmas Island</a> (PIP Magazine)</li>
<li><a href="http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/node/1036886">5 Native Tribal Organizations Reviving the Sustainable Agriculture Tradition</a> (Sustainable Cities Collective)</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>We’re looking for a volunteer to regularly curate “This week in Growstuff”. Check out the job description and drop us a line if you’re interested!</p>Here’s a roundup of what’s been happening in the world of Growstuff over the last week or so.