Sunday, 15 February 2009

Performance enhancements, more stash options and personal journal search

This week at Folia HQ we've been mainly working on a heap of performance tuning to make sure we get through the busy springtime. There isn't many visible changes this week I'm afraid, but we did manage to sneak in a couple of little goodies:

More options to describe your stash

Om suggested a couple of other options for seed stash (Corms, Sets, Roots & Pods) that we've added to the system - you'll now find the new options on your Add Stash and Edit Stash pages.

New search box for your journal page

Supporters will find a shiny new journal search box on their journal home page. Woo! This one was suggested by a couple of people: nax , Merelymel13 and Armorel

Blistering fast Grapevine

Nath would also like to add that he has suped up the Grapevine to a blistering speed - so no more waiting around for your grapevine fix!

Hope you like, and remember if you have any suggestions for the site, we'd love you to add them to our Suggestions & Feedback group.

Group your Planting Lists by Lifecycle Type, Genus and More!

Grouping your planting listsYou may have already noticed a couple of new links at the top of your Planting & Stash lists – these links can now be used to group your lists in a couple of different (and exciting!) ways. The grouping uses data from the plant wiki to determine lifecycle types and categories, so jump in and edit the wiki to get your plant list grouping. It will also only work on plantings that have been classified, so get in there and start classifying your plantings!

The options are pretty self explanatory, but to give you some examples from my own lists, you can now:

Group by Genus: This will display your list grouped by each genus your plants belong to. See my list for an example.

Group by Lifecycle Type: This will group your list based on the lifecycle of each planting (Annual, Perennial etc.) See my list for an example

Group by Category: This will group your plantings based on the plant category (Vegetable, Herb, Succulent, Tree etc.) See my list for an example

These features are at present only available to our Supporters – our fantastic Supporters help us to pay for hosting costs to keep the site going. If you want to find out more about becoming a Supporter, visit our Supporter Page!

Saturday, 7 February 2009

Getting organised for gardening

Hey There!

We've spent the last week or so completely re-writing the garden task page with a brand spankin’ new layout and funky new features.

So the task page will look a bit different, now you can complete a task directly from that page. You can now repeat tasks that need doing more than once – like weeding, watering and fertilising whilst still assigning it to a plant or garden. And when you complete a repeating task it will create a new task in the future based on the repeating rules you’ve entered! Woohoo!

For our lovely supporters, we’ve also added a whole bunch of ways to export tasks into your other devices and programs, like RSS feeds, CSV and iCalendar. So you can have tasks anywhere you need to see them! These export links are special so that only you can see them and means that you can still access your private folia stuff without actually having to log in to folia.

Now the caveats and known issues. For some reason the person who wrote the icalendar exporter kinda stuffed up the recurring task bit. So if you subscribe to your icalendar tasks then the recurring ones will only show the first task only not the subsequent recurring ones. But I’m looking into that one and should have it fixed soon. The iCalendar has only really been tested using iCal on a Mac so please feel free to drop it into Outlook, Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Mozilla Sunbird and see how it works :)