I am pleased to announce that I have completely revamped the Recommendations feature, and it is now re-created as the ATP Book of Gardening Recommendation, or "The Book" for short.
Trish doesn't love the name but she said she also doesn't hate it. I told her when she gives me a better name for it, we'll change the name.
Anyway, this new feature is a complete "from the ground-up" rewrite of the Recommendations feature. It acts very much like the old recommendations feature, just much better, and way more powerful. Additionally, with this new platform, we will be able to add improvements to it very quickly as we want them.
Here are some new features that are now available in The Book:
1) You're no longer restricted to just recommending ecommerce companies. You can now enter other kinds of organizations, like display/public gardens, local garden centers, garden clubs and associations.)
2) You can now edit companies!! Just like in the Plants Database, if you see an error, scroll to the bottom of the company's page, and click on "Edit this company's details" and you'll have the full range of all the checkboxes and text fields. Make your changes and submit the proposal, and a moderator (currently that's just me) will approve it and the changes will then take effect.
3) We have custom data fields for the companies, just like we do with the plant database. So, if you enter an ecommerce company (or edit an existing one) you'll find extra stuff like "What do they specialize in" and you can check off daylilies or roses or what have you. In the near future, once enough companies get edited to incorporate their extra details, I will write extra searching tools that will help you narrow your search to just rose sellers, etc.
At the moment, I don't have any custom data fields setup for public gardens, garden centers, or clubs and associations. Sometime in the future when we figure out what info we want to include, I will make it happen. Also, if we ever want to add additional categories of companies (Books, Magazines, Websites, etc) we will be able to do that.
I feel like this first step is an important milestone for ATP. We will be able to better serve the gardening industry with this feature, and I have several upcoming enhancements planned that will allow the companies to better interact directly with ATP via this feature.
So have fun and please feel free to go edit your favorite companies to check off what they specialize in!
Any questions or ideas, just ask!
