How to Use the Zip Recipes Plugin

How to make a recipe post (gutenberg)

1. Once you’ve installed the Zip Recipes Plugin, click “Add New” under Posts (or pages, or any other post type you want the recipe embedded in) on the left-hand navigation bar. When you’re on the “Add New Post” screen you will see this

2. You can start to make a new blogpost now, to go with your recipe. When you are ready to insert the recipe, click on the plus sign in the left hand corner.

How to add a new or existing recipe to your post with Gutenberg editor (for Classic, scroll down)

3. Click on the plus sign in the left hand corner. You will get this screen: Click on Zip Recipes.

If you do not see the zip recipes icon between your most used blocks, then simply click in the search bar and type: zip. The icon will now appear. Click it.

4. On the right hand side of the page the Zip Recipe options will open up now. This looks like this:

view of the screen with Zip Recipe options

Click on “Create and insert recipe” and create your recipe. When you get the following notice:

it means that your blog post is not saved yet, so it is probably best to cancel and first save your draft before continuing. The draft is automatically saved from time to time, so you might not get this notice at all.

If you already have created recipes, you can easily select them at this point.

Making a recipe first, and a blog post later

You can also start to make a recipe from the “recipes” section in the lefthand menu

screen shot of recipe section

Then, once you have created your blog post you can link the right recipe to it. (see ” how to add a new or existing recipe to your post”)

How to make a recipe post (Classic editor)

1. Once you’ve installed the Zip Recipes Plugin, click “Add New” under Posts (or pages, or any other post type you want the recipe embedded in) on the left-hand navigation bar. When you’re on the “Add New Post” screen you will see this

image of new post screen

2. You can start to make a new blogpost now, to go with your recipe. When you are ready to insert the recipe, click on “Create and insert new recipe” When you get the following notice:

it means that your blog post is not saved yet, so it is probably best to cancel and first save your draft before continuing. The draft is automatically saved from time to time, so you might not get this notice at all.

3. If you want to select an existing recipe to go with this post, you can do so just above the create and insert new recipe button

shows where to click to create a new recipe

Making a recipe first, and a blog post later

You can also start to make a recipe from the “recipes” section in the lefthand menu

screen shot of recipe section

Then, once you have created your blog post you can link the right recipe to it. (see ” how to add a new or existing recipe to your post”)

Creating a new recipe (Gutenberg and classic)

Ingredients

  • You can simply add the ingredients, just make sure each ingredient is on a separate line
  • If you are adding a recipe that has a secondary recipe, maybe for a sauce or a glaze, pay special attention. Add ingredients for the main recipe, then start the next line with an exclamation point to create a label, like !For the Sauce. Then, add the ingredients for the secondary recipe.

For an example of such a recipe, see here

Instructions and more

  • Put your instructions also on separate lines. Again, use ! to create the instructions for secondary recipes, like in the example above.
  • If you scroll down, you can also enter more details, like rating, prep time, cook time, serving size and yield. Click the “Save” button when you are done.

You will see a preview of your recipe as you type. Like so:

preview of the add a recipe screen

 

How to change the lay out of your recipes, or change themes

  1. Go to ZipRecipes in your dashboard (left hand side) and click. A new screen opens up where you can choose between several themes. Choose one, and click “Save”. For a preview, see our demo website

picture of the settings page

Getting back to your post goes like this:

Click on “edit linked post” as is shown here:

When you are satisfied with your post, publish as usual.

Here’s what a recipe will look like in Google search results.

Just like the big recipe sites, such as AllRecipes.com and FoodNetwork.com, your recipes can also show up in the Rich Snippets format within Google Recipe Search with a photo, ingredients, cook time and ratings.

 

How to edit or change a recipe (Gutenberg and classic)

To edit a recipe, you have 2 options.

  1. Start from the recipe overview, in your dashboard under “recipes”. Here you have a list of all your recipes that you can edit, delete or unlink from its post. You can also add new recipes here, and link them to a post later.
  2. Start from the post in question, open it and then click on the recipe block. The recipe options, just like shown under “creating a recipe”, (see above) will be shown on the right hand side.screen with edit recipe options, entered from posts

In Classic, the screen will look like this, but the options are the same:

shows where to edit an image

Adjusting Your Settings

1. From your WordPress dashboard, scroll to halfway and click Zip Recipes on the left-hand side

picture of the settings page

2. Let’s take a look at each. If you choose to make any changes, be sure to click the blue “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page when you are finished. Any changes you make here will be reflected across all recipes posted on your site using the Zip Recipes Plugin.

  • General. Here you find options to change the lay out of your recipe. The themes, a jump to the recipe link, how you want to style your ingredients and instructions, etc. Also you can include  your own copy right statement.
  • Nutrition. Here you find all Nutrition options. The automatic Nutrition generator is available in the ZipRecipes Premium plan. If you upgrade and already have a lot of recipes you can enable the “Import nutrition data for all recipes” so you do not have to create a nutrition label for each recipe one at the time.
  • Image. Choose wether you would like to include an image in your recipes or not. Depending on this setting, you get the other 2 options, to set the width and to prevent double images in post and recipe
  • Print Settings. All pretty evident
  • Social where you can check all the social media buttons
  • Authors where you can play around with your authors 🙂
  • Hide labels choose all the labels that you want or do not want to include in your recipes
  • Add ons depending on program
  • Notifications
  • Advanced If you do not want to use ZipRecipes styles, uncheck this box and make your own

F.A.Q.

If your license is activated, you should be able to update from the WordPress plugins dashboard. If this doesn’t work, there’s probably a configuration issue on your server. We’ve listed several of the most common causes.

Sure! Just go to your account, then click “view licenses”, then “view upgrade”. There you have options to pay the additional amount.

The download link you received in the initial e-mail is valid for 24 hours. After the link has expired you can log in to your ZIP Recipes account to download the plugin again. When logged in to your account you will see a section “your purchases”. 

Clicking on the ‘View Details and Downloads’ button will take you to a new page. On this new page scroll down to locate the ‘Products’ section. In the products section you can click on the plugin hyperlink to download the plugin.

To install the plugin, you can follow these instructions on Really Simple SSL

When you purchase one of our plugins an account is created automatically. You can reset your password here

If you don’t remember the email you used for the purchase, or did the purchase before the automatic account creation was activated, please contact us and we’ll set it up for you. 

You can create a new password via the following link: https://ziprecipes.net/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword

When getting a ‘this email is not authorized to renew license’ error, try clearing cookies from your browser. That will likely solve the issue.

If you click the download link after you have purchased a plugin, you should download a zipped file which you can upload to WordPress. If this is not the case, you are probably using Safari. This is easy to fix. Go to:

Safari > Preferences > General > Open “safe” files after downloading: uncheck.