In this tutorial you will learn how to install and set up the free version of the popular WP Recipe Maker plugin developed by Bootstrapped Ventures. It is the most used plugin for food recipes and is active on more than 50,000 websites.
One of its main features is that it automatically handles all recipe metadata, so that your recipes will appear as rich snippets in search engines.
For this tutorial I’m using the Nutmeg WordPress theme. This plugin is recommended in my guide for starting a food blog.
Let’s begin.
Video Transcription
Install WP Recipe Maker Plugin
WP Recipe Maker is available for free on wordpress.org, so you can download it directly from the Dashboard.
When you activate the plugin for the very first time, an onboarding process will begin.
The first page explains how to add the recipes depending on your content editor.
On the next page, you can choose the template for your recipes. The Chic template is probably the best looking one, but if your theme has a very narrow content area, then the Compact template might be a better choice.
The last step allows you to enable or disable recipe snippets. You will see them in action a little later in the video. I’ll enable the Snippet Basic Buttons option.
WP Recipe Maker Settings
Before I create my first recipe, let’s go through the rest of the plugin’s settings.
Most of these settings are fine with their default values, but a few of them need to be looked at.
In the Recipe Snippets section, you can change the snippet placement.
You can enable or disable comment ratings. That allows users to add a rating when posting a comment on a post that has a recipe in it.
In the Social Sharing section you can disable the feature that allows visitors to add your recipe images to Pinterest.
In the Links section, it’s usually best to enable both settings in the General part.
In the Recipe Editing section, most users should probably enable all 3 options, as that saves plenty of time. The recipe title and thumbnail usually corresponds to the ones set for the parent post.
In the Performance section, I enable the “Only load Assets when needed” option and the two options in Template Assets location.
And finally, just for peace of mind, I enable both options in the Permissions section, to prevent visitors from accidentally seeing my unpublished recipes using the print feature.
Publish a New Food Recipe
Let’s publish a new recipe using WP Recipe Maker.
I will create a new post, add a recipe title, some paragraphs of text and a featured image. This is what the published post looks like without the WPRM recipe card.
Back to our post, let’s add a new block and search for WPRM.
Add the main WPRM Recipe block and click on the Create new Recipe button.
I can skip the image and the name of the recipe, because earlier in the plugin’s settings I made sure that it uses the post title and featured image for the recipe.
Fill in the information that is relevant for this recipe.
Add the ingredients and the step by step instructions.
Click Save & Close and then Update your post.
This is what a sample recipe card looks like.
There is a discrepancy between the typeface in my theme and the recipe card. This happens because WPRM loads a custom font and there is no quick way to disable it.
How to Create a Custom Recipe Template in WP Recipe Maker
Instead, you can change the font by customizing the recipe template. Let’s do that.
Go to the Settings page of WP Recipe Maker. At the top open the Template Editor.
Select Recipe Templates and then select your preferred template. I use the Chic template.
Now click on the Clone & Edit Template button and select a name for your custom version of it.
You can preview your changes using one of your own recipes.
The first thing that I will do is change the Main Font Family and the Header Font Family to the “Inherit from parent” value.
Then I will click on Edit Blocks and move my mouse over the list of blocks to see which one I want to customize. I want to change the green color of the Print Recipe button.
Click on it and change the two color values to your color of choice.
Don’t forget to save your changes.
If we look at our recipe, you will see that nothing really changed.
That happens because I only created a custom recipe template, but the plugin is still set up to use the default Chic template.
Back on the Settings page of WPRM, in the Recipe Template section select your custom template. Now after saving the changes, all our recipes will use the custom template.
End Notes
Congratulations! Now you have a basic understanding of how to install, use and customize the free version of WP Recipe Maker plugin by Bootstrapped Ventures.
For this video I used my own Nutmeg Plus WordPress theme, which has full support for WP Recipe Maker.
Be the first to comment