Add collections

[m4lt3]

I'd be very happy about a feature to create custom collections, in addition to categories and tags (e.g. "my favourite recipes" collection). This would make managing many recipes much easier.

Implementing this feature should just require a new table with a 1:n. connection between collections and recipes.

Currently the only way to group recipes this "randomly" would be by bookmarking the recipes and organising the bookmarks in your browser, but that seems quite impractical.

[seyfeb]

I leave here as a reference #340, though there is a lot to read. There the support of multiple cookbooks is discussed, which might be an orthogonal concept to collections.

[christianlupus]

I am not sure, what @m4lt3 is intending to achieve here. Let's put the implementation aside, the question is why is it needed.

I can think of two basic use cases:

1. Organisation of recipes in separate folders. Then we are more concerned about Meta: Future file structure #340. The real intention is a cleaner file structure in the NC instance.
2. Partitioning of the set of recipes into (virtual) subsets. Here, keywords/tags would maybe be the way to go. The intention would be merely a nicer user interface/experience during the navigation.

Especially for point 2, it might be an option to make the keywords hierarchical in a tree-like structure. Then, each user could have a custom recipe structure to organize the recipes in these. Details must be discussed of course.
This would have to be represented in the UI of course.

[Donatzsky]

@christianlupus This is clearly about case 2.

My suggestion would be to repurpose categories, instead of adding yet another organisational layer. So stick with the current categories + tags, but make it so a recipe can have more than one category. Perhaps also make categories hierarchical, but that's a separate discussion, I think.

[christianlupus]

The categories are not very powerful. They are only text (ref).

One could think of allowing multiple categories per recipe but hierarchical categories are unfortunately out of scope.

The thing with the separate folders is more about the sharing feature (#82).

Yet still, as we are short in manpower, every new feature needs a clean plan unless a volunteer hands in a PR. So, to avoid unneeded and potentially complex code changes that bloat the feature list, it would be very important why this feature is needed. Give an example. Get concrete. Make clear why the keywords e.g. are not sufficient.

Just by creating a new category (that you have to attach manually to each recipe), you have all recipes in one view. The keywords can do this just now already. You can (currently) not do any batch operations on the recipes. So, I do not get the point here, sorry.