We’ve updated Growstuff’s website with heaps of new features

[alexbayleaf]

Originally published at Growstuff Blog. You can comment here or there.

We’re pleased to announce a major update to our website including lots of great new stuff.

Major features:

• Massive crop upload including brassicas, squashes, mint familiy (Lamaciae) and more.
• Follow other members. You can now follow other Growstuff members. (Note: there are still some improvements to be made to the email notifications related to this.)
• Send out regular planting reminder emails to members (although this has been ready for a while, we’ll finally be switching this on in production with this release!)

Minor improvements:

Detail of the updated homepage

• Some changes to the layout of the homepage — we’ve moved what was in the sidebar down into footer links, and given the rest of the homepage a little more breathing room.
• Started to use and manage plural versions of crop names, eg. “tomatoes” rather than “tomato”. This is more complex than it sounds because many food crops have irregular pluralisation!
• Small improvements to the crop detail page to make it easier to find via search engines.
• Added Facebook contact link to footer (alongside Twitter etc)
• Rearranged titles on RSS feeds to make them display better in browser tabs
• Made it easier to specify the date on which a planting was finished, via a popup calendar on the planting detail page
• Improved the flow for signing in, if you try to do something you don’t have authorization to do.

Bugfixes:

• Improved display of crops on the “Browse crops” page, especially making sure that the text of crops with long names doesn’t overflow and mess up the alignment.
• Show finished date correctly on plantings index page
• Prevent the creation of a garden with a negative number for its area
• Remove unused photos — if a photo is removed from all the plantings/harvests it was being shown on, the photo is now deleted from the system entirely.

Technical improvements:

• Upgraded our underlying platform to Rails 4! This is a big change, and very welcome, as it brings us up to date technologically. Also bumped our Ruby version to 2.1.5.
• Fixed problems installing libv8 on OSX (much appreciated by our developers!)

Thanks to all our developers, testers, crop wranglers, and others who helped us with all of this, and a special shout-out to new contributors Kevie, Rocky and Justin, as well as Marion, Juliet and Sam whose crop wrangling was a major part of this release!