Recipe Sharing Platform

Family recipes live in notebooks, phone galleries and memory — and when someone wants to share one properly, social media gives them a caption box and buries the post in a day. Cooking needs structure: an ingredient list you can shop from, steps in order, timings that were actually tested, and reviews from people who cooked it. This project builds a dedicated recipe platform around that structure: a publishing flow (basics → ingredients → method steps → photo), a discovery feed with category and diet filters, recipe pages with at-a-glance timings, and a review system where cooks report how the recipe turned out for them. Engagement is honest — likes, saves and ratings rather than vanity metrics — so the best-tested recipes rise. The demo ships with realistic recipes, reviews and photos so the platform feels alive on first load.

1. A cook signs up and opens the publishing flow: title, category, diet, timings, servings and difficulty.
2. Ingredients are entered one per line; method steps are added as numbered cards with optional per-step notes.
3. A cover photo is uploaded, resized and thumbnailed by the image pipeline, then the recipe is published with a clean URL.
4. Other users discover it via the feed, category filters or search — including ingredient search ("what can I make with paneer?").
5. Cooks try the recipe and leave star ratings plus written reviews noting substitutions or timing tweaks.
6. Likes and saves accumulate; the feed ranking weighs recency, rating and engagement so tested recipes surface.
7. Authors watch their dashboard for views, likes and saves per recipe.

Tech stack:

• Frontend: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript (responsive)
• Backend: PHP (Laravel) or Node.js + Express
• Database: MySQL (users, recipes, ingredients, steps, reviews)
• Image handling: upload, resize, thumbnails
• Search: full-text across titles and ingredients
• Auth: session-based user accounts
• Deployment: shared hosting or VPS

• [Guided recipe publishing] Multi-section form — basics, ingredients, numbered steps, cover photo — with validation before a recipe goes live.
• [Rich recipe pages] At-a-glance prep/cook time, servings and difficulty, full ingredient list, numbered method, and author info.
• [Ratings & reviews] Star ratings plus written reviews where cooks report substitutions and results, shown on every recipe.
• [Discovery & filters] Category chips (breakfast, festive, healthy), diet filters (veg, vegan, non-veg) and text search across titles and ingredients.
• [Likes & saves] One-tap likes and a personal saved-recipes collection for each user.
• [Author profiles] Each cook's published recipes, total likes and average rating in one place.
• [Photo uploads] Cover photo per recipe with resizing and thumbnails generated on upload.

• Complete web application source code (frontend + backend)
• Database schema with migrations and seeded recipe data
• Publishing flow, recipe pages, discovery feed and review modules
• Image upload and thumbnail pipeline
• Project report PDF (background, system design, database schema, methodology)
• PPT presentation for final review
• Viva Q&A preparation document (content modeling, search design, image handling)

• The demo uses generated food photographs as placeholders; a live community needs real user-uploaded photos.
• One cover photo per recipe in the demo build; step-by-step photos are listed in future scope.
• Ingredient search matches text, not semantics — "coriander" and "cilantro" are different strings to the search.
• Nutritional information is not computed; the demo does not include a nutrition database.
• Email notifications for new reviews are stubbed and need the buyer's SMTP credentials.