2013-09-12: places, help text, bulbs, crop hierarchy, etc

Release notes

• The most significant new feature is the "Places" page, which shows where our members are located. This is a fairly trivial use of our geodata, but now we've got all the pieces in place, we'll be able to do maps of things like where crops are grown, what's being grown near a given location, etc.
• We removed "search for nearby members" and integrated it into the Places pages eg. Melbourne. These specific place-pages are now linked from various places around the site, eg. member profiles, seed sharing lists, etc.
• We also improved the "members near a place" function so it always shows the 30 nearest members, in order of nearness.
• As a side effect of all this, the following new endpoints are available in our "Version 0" API: /places.json (a list of everything mappable, which for now is just members, but may include other things in future), and /places/ANYWHERE.json (a list of mappable things in order of distance from that location, in order of nearness)
• We added helpful text in a few places, most notably on the planting form (in response to suggestions from Growstuff member mamagotcha.
• We added "bulb" as a propagation method for plantings, thanks to a suggestion from someone on Twitter (sorry, my memory is not that great and nor is my Twitter client's)
• We added a crop hierarchy page, mostly useful to crop wranglers but potentially of interest to others. It shows crops and their varieties in an indented tree format. The same code is now used for displaying sub-varieties on individual crop pages, too.

And that's it, I think!

This release was made from the Growstuff HQ blanket fort.

2013-08-30

This is the first time we've used Github releases to track our changes.

"Release", to us, means "merge to master and then push to the production website". For all previous releases, look in our pull request history for PRs that are named "Production push: ..."

Release Notes

• Added newsletter subscription checkbox to signup form and member settings page. When checked, this communicates with Mailchimp via their API. NOTE FOR DEVELOPERS: you need a Mailchimp API key for this to work, but if you don't have one, it'll just fail silently (intentionally).
• Reined in an over-enthusiastic rake task that was assigning all new crops as having been created by cropbot, even when a real person created them.
• Added a direct Planting.owner property -- previously we'd got this indirectly via Garden. This should have no visible effects, and is just preparatory work towards the "share a garden" story that we're working on next.