wiki-vault/Sources/Venture/pbs-membership-platform-overview.md

created	path	project	tags	type
2026-06-12	Sources/Venture	pbs-membership-platform-overview	pbs sunnie membership garden	project-plan

Goal

Single source of truth for the big picture of the PBS Membership Platform — the initiative to evolve plantbasedsoutherner.com from a content site into a full plant-based lifestyle platform. This document orients; it does not duplicate phase-level detail.

Read this first at the start of any membership planning session, then drill into the specific phase doc you're working on.

End-State Vision

A full plant-based lifestyle platform powered by a standalone Flask backend (the Sunflower Garden) running alongside WordPress. WordPress owns identity; the Garden owns membership features. Free tier first, paid tiers later.

The platform is delivered as four Lines of Effort (see Phases). Beyond the LOEs sit two horizon goals — not yet scoped, intentionally past the current roadmap:

• A companion app
• A custom LLM trained on plant-based cooking knowledge

These are direction, not plans. They exist here so the roadmap remembers where it's ultimately pointed.

Locked Decisions

These architectural decisions are settled and inherited by every LOE:

• WordPress owns identity, the Garden owns features. Bridge = validated WordPress session + read-only access to wp_posts.
• The Garden is a standalone Flask app in its own container, separate from pbs-hub. Shared MySQL server; no shared application tables or logic.
• Database: pbs_garden, with a generic user_interactions table serving all interaction types.
• Auth: WordPress validates its own cookie (Option 2) via an internal-only endpoint. Secrets stay sealed in WordPress; ~5 min per-session cache.
• Tiers are WordPress roles[] — no separate tier field, no second source of truth.
• Garden lives at /the-garden/, Traefik path-routed, and owns its own visual identity (Option D — intentionally distinct from the main site).

Open Items

None at drafting — this is the originating roadmap.

Phases

The Four Lines of Effort

LOE	Project
1	Recipe Saving
2	Weekly Meal Plan Viewer
3	Whole Food Diversity Tracker
4	User Profiles & Preferences

Why this order: the LOEs are sequenced not only by priority but because each teaches skills that compound into the next. LOE 1 is foundational — it establishes the shared membership infrastructure (WordPress-cookie auth, the user_interactions table, Flask patterns, and the Garden shell) that every later LOE inherits. Build it first and the rest get cheaper.

LOE 1 — Recipe Saving (phase ladder)

• Phase 0 — Ultimate Member setup (registration, login, roles, basic profile)
• Phase 1 — Backend foundation: pbs_garden DB, the Garden Flask app, WP-cookie auth endpoint, the four interaction APIs
• Phase 2 — Save button on WordPress recipe pages (JS widget; needs Phase 1's check endpoint)
• Phase 3 — Saved-recipes member area = the Garden frontend, broken into 3a–3e:
  • 3a shell → 3b saved-recipes card wired to data → 3c detail page → 3d recently-added strip + empty state → 3e coming-soon cards
• Phase 4 — Collections (named recipe groups)
• Phase 5 — Polish (mobile, loading states, error handling)

Notes

• The Garden naming: the member area is "the Sunflower Garden," at /the-garden/. Community members are Sunnies.
• This doc exists because the big picture was previously scattered across multiple phase docs and chat sessions, forcing every session to reconstruct the map from fragments. This is the map.