Celebrating the first year of Adobe Cookbooks 2.0

Have you ever found yourself heads-down on a project, only to get derailed by a development issue that you can't seem to resolve? Or maybe you enjoy giving back to the community by contributing workarounds and code snippets that you discover during the course of your development? If so, then you'll want to check out Adobe Cookbooks, a one-stop shop for finding and sharing code samples.

As product manager for the Adobe Developer Connection, I have seen code samples become an increasingly popular and valuable resource for Adobe developers. Sometimes a clear, concise code sample is all you need to get a project started—or get it back on track when you're stuck. The Adobe Cookbooks application is a searchable repository containing hundreds of community-generated code samples that can help you do just that.

Since we've opened our doors

Adobe Cookbooks 2.0 has been live almost exactly one year since I wrote this article, so it seemed like the perfect time to update it with some new details. The Adobe Cookbooks application has been wildly successful since its relaunch. Here are some high-level statistics from the past year:

• Page views: 2,662,346
• Visits: 1,386,970
• Recipes contributed: 606
• Comments: 1,156

While these numbers help illustrate the success of the application, they are really more of a commentary on how terrific the Adobe communities are. So many of you are willing to share your code samples and workarounds with your fellow community members.

What our customers are saying

The reviews are in and it seems that our customers have delighted in feasting on the wide range of code snippets that have been contributed to the Adobe Cookbooks over the past year. Below is an appetizer of comments recently left on some cookbook recipe contributions:

• Couldn't for the life of me figure out why nothing worked in my application—until Google found this lifesaver document!!
• This example is perfect. It probably saved me a whole day's worth of work in trying to figure out how to alter the less-thorough examples I had found to suit my needs. Thanks!!
• It has been extremely difficult to create generic methods for vectors... I was bound and determined there must be a way, and lo and behold... Thanks so much!
• Seems like a great, reusable way to handle complex permissions. Thanks [for] posting your solution.
• Nice, I didn't know that exists. Gotta try it out. Thanks for sharing.
• I had been doing cfmail the same way for so long that I didn't know it had changed. Good to know the right way.

Keep the positive feedback coming. Nothing encourages our authors to keep contributing more than knowing that their efforts make a difference and are appreciated. But hold on, we're not done quite yet.

And for dessert...

Community participation is the backbone of Adobe Cookbooks, so whether you are coming to contribute, request or locate a recipe, or comment on and rate existing content, your participation in this community application is greatly appreciated.

As a thank-you to the community for their great support, we have recently been sponsoring some recipe drives to reward our contributors. We just wrapped up a ColdFusion Cookbook recipe drive, which resulted in over 40 new ColdFusion code recipes being contributed in just four weeks. On the heels of that success, it gives me great pleasure to roll out another drive for our Flex, Flash Professional, and ActionScript recipe contributors.

We aren't resting on our laurels though. We are currently pulling together a plan for another rev of the cookbook application and would love to hear your thoughts and ideas. We invite you to post your comments and suggestions in the Cookbook Feedback Forum if you have any suggestions or requests for Cookbooks 3.0.