I am building a recipes site and want to build a search by ingredients feature. So the user will enter all the ingredients they have. It will then find recipes that can be made with these ingredients. I'm not looking for someone to write the code for me, just give advice on how to approach it. Can it be done with just an ingredients column in the database that includes a text list of required ingredients? Or do I have to set it up some other way?
It can be done that way. You SELECT ... WHERE ingredients LIKE %the-user-input% (or *the-user-input*, depending on the database). It's not the most efficient, from the viewpoint of the database, but with the amount of data you'll probably have, it shouldn't make too much difference in the time it takes to return your list of recipes. You might want to write a full-blown search, though. Allow the user to add And and/or OR lines on the fly, so they can search for something like corn syrup and marshmallow and not cream.