Monthly Archives: November 2014

OpenFarm Developer Update and Overview

OpenFarm Blog

It’s what everyone’s been waiting for – an update from the OpenFarm development team.

It’s been an incredibly busy month in stats. There have been about 50,000 bits of code added to the database (and 25,000 bits deleted, which is about as important really) since the start of August. The OpenFarm codebase has 18 contributors – which we’re absolutely thrilled with – not considering the amazing people doing so much work outside of the code (which is a lot harder to measure, but this is a dev update, so we’ll stick to that).

Numbers aside, here’s an overview of OpenFarm as a program:

OpenFarm runs on Ruby on Rails enhanced with a largely AngularJS front-end (this is still a matter of debate). We have a MongoDB database, which guarantees maximum flexibility in these early growth stages, and fast search and upgrading into the future. Search of our database is powered by ElectricSearch. Our code is stored on GitHub. If you’re interested in such things, OpenFarm has a testing framework that reports to Coveralls – we try to keep our back-end test coverage at 100%. We’re still looking for a good way to test front-end code. Continue reading OpenFarm Developer Update and Overview →

Homepage Facelift

OpenFarm Blog

The OpenFarm development team has been hard at work giving the site a clean, modern, and unified facelift as we roll out new features. Our new homepage has an awesome video background with scenes of my friends in a community garden near my home, and also my backyard chickens! We think it is a fun, engaging, mood setting introduction to OpenFarm that we hope will make users smile.

The rest of the Homepage remains simple so as to put Search and Guide Creation front and center. Below the scroll is a Featured Section which will be populated with the most popular Crops! We’d love to hear your thoughts on the new homepage. Drop us a line in the comments below!

Here are all of our mockups that lead us to this design, and thanks to the homepages of Airbnb and Instructables for inspiration! Shoutout to Ryan McLeod for helping with the design process and actually writing the code to make it pixel perfect! Continue reading Homepage Facelift →

The Growing Guide – An Evolution

OpenFarm Blog

Growing Guides are the body of OpenFarm; they are the primary piece of content that capture the methodology of growing a Crop based on a single author’s perspective. Growing Guides are both creative and highly structured documents. They are fixed in concept while fluid in detail, as the exact data they convey changes not only on what the author decides to share, but also on who is reading the Guide, where they live, and their farm or garden’s environmental conditions. The data is not only meant for humans to read, but machines and other applications too. Guide content can be translated across hemispheres, units, and languages alike. Guides are complex, and yet I think we are approaching a beautifully simple interface and experience for creating and consuming them.

This blog post is a story of how the Growing Guide has evolved since I started thinking about OpenFarm nearly one year ago. Continue reading The Growing Guide – An Evolution →

What do you think about the OpenFarm Guide Creation Flow?

OpenFarm Blog,

Hi OpenFarm Backers!

We’ve been hard at work adding features, data, and style to OpenFarm over the last month. Have you seen the new homepage?! Now, we could use your input for the next step in our progress: Guide Creation.

Growing Guides are the primary piece of content on OpenFarm, and so the way that someone creates a Guide needs to be well thought out. We’re aiming for a process that is:

  • Fun,
  • Easy,
  • Allows for author creativity, and
  • Guides the author to produce high quality, consistently formatted content.

Click here to see the mockups and share your input!

A sneak preview: