December 2005 - Koha-devel - lists.koha-community.org

Sharing experience with utf-8
by Tumer Garip 03 Jan '06

03 Jan '06

Here is what we had to do to use koha in utf-8 hoping that it helps in some of your discussions: 1- We are using koha since 2.2.0 now at 2.2.2b 2- We use English for intranet and English-Turkish for opac 3- The platform is Windows 4- We changed the character set of the database to utf-8 with the iso-xxxx data in it. No problem for Mysql as you are moving up the ladder. No need to reload the data (10 min) 5- Changed all the charset=iso-xxxx in the templates to read utf-8 and saved the files as utf-8 (15 min.) in a simple text editor. 6- Character decode in biblio for MARC21 is very ambigious for us because it is not very clear which character encoding it is changing from. All the marc records we bulkimport are MARC-8 , iso2709 or ANSEL or whatever you want to call them. So we simply wrote a one to one character mapping of MARC-8 to utf-8 for our Turkish accented characters. Here it is: #Additional Turkish characters s/(\xf0)s/ş/gm; s/(\xf0)S/Ş/gm; s/(\xf0)c/ç/gm; s/(\xf0)C/Ç/gm; s/\xe7\x49/İ/gm; s/(\xe6)G/Ğ/gm; s/(\xe6)g/ğ/gm; s/\xB8/ı/gm; s/\xB9/£/gm; s/(\xe8|\xc8)o/ö/gm ; s/(\xe8|\xc8)O/Ö/gm ; s/(\xe8|\xc8)u/ü/gm ; s/(\xe8|\xc8)U/Ü/gm ; s/\xc2\xb8/ı/gm; All the character codes are directly from LC's website about MARC21. Since we provided the actual characters rather than their codes we saved the biblio.pm as utf8 to save time. (Half a day together with research) 7- We have a full working koha as utf8 supporting all characters and we keep doing the same thing everytime we get an update. 8- Translation of opac files through .po files do not work for us. As we see it, this po translator is simply a search and replace text engine. So it converts the string ' English English <somevariable> English.' to ' Turkish Turkish <somevariable> Turkish'. Which is useless as it should be 'Turkish <somevariable> Turkish Turkish'. 9- So we sat down and translated the opac templates to proper Turkish. It is now more easier for our people to follow the changes in cvs and implement the changes to templates rather than doing complete translations every time. 10- The whole update up till now is taking less than half a day with one person doing it. 11- We as Windows people do not have much experience with this po editor. But as far as I know it supports utf8 so whats the hassle about these translations? As far as we understand it the official language of KOHA is English and if someone is translating it to some other language it is their responsibility to find the resources to translate it in time to be implemented as an additional language. Even if this requires a complete rewrite of some templates. 12- Finally we believe that koha should start using utf8 ASAP before the move to zebra to gain experience. If zebra is implemented with all this iso stuff we will have more problems with each translation requiring a different character set and sort order set and character mapping to set etc. etc. Koha is more powerful with more features, stability and performance and I believe people will be more happy to see improvement in these even if they have to spend a little bit more resource on their own translations. With no prejudice, Tumer Garip Near East Univ. Library Director Cyprus tgarip(a)neu.edu.tr

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Re: Italian translation of Koha
by paul POULAIN 30 Dec '05

30 Dec '05

Tarcisio Fedrizzi a écrit : >Hi we are an italian society (Leader.IT) and we are interested in the >italian translation of Koha. So we have taken contact with one of the >translators Giuseppe Angilella, and he says us that he cannot prosecute >with the translation. So he says to contact you in order to get the access >to the online translation platform so we can resume the italian >translation. I apologize for my bad english and I hope you understand what >I wrote. > >Thank you for the attention. >Bye and Happy New Year. =) >Fedrizzi Tarcisio > > Hello Fedrizzi, For french translation of Koha, i Use kartouche. I've hacked it a little to fit some specific needs. I've added the italian translation for guiseppe, you can work on it : it's available here : http://bureau.paulpoulain.com/kartouche/ Let me know when you have translated many strings and want to test the results, i'll open some italian Koha for you on my desktop. (if bureau.paulpoulain.com don't work, that may be possible because of some DNS problems I have, the IP is : 213.41.184.186) -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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Koha 2.2.5 roadmap
by Paul POULAIN 20 Dec '05

20 Dec '05

Hi, some news about 2.2.5 roadmap. It should be released as christmas gift, at the end of next week, or maybe january, 2nd. French libraries are testing this version. It almost only fixes bugs. Merry & holy christmas to everybody. Here the Release Notes of the future version : BUGFIXES === ACQUISITION === * suggestion/acquisition bugfixes : - 200 field is no more splitted in 2 parts - author is after title in UNIMARC (dirty solution, but mySQL has a strange behaviour) - when the book is recieved, the suggestion is marked "available" and a mail is sent * printing stylesheet dropped ALL <p> (hiding too many things in order printing) === CATALOGUING === * Repeated subfield in authority were not being reported in the biblio while cataloguing * when AuthoBarcode=ON and MARC=ON the barcode was not calculated automatically. Now, the barcode will be calculated (and any manual entry discarded during save) * adding a feature to enable reordering of subfields in MARC editor (can be considered as a bug ? at least one of my libraries think that yes !) * when a note is added to items it was not stored into non MARC-DB * permission required to use a plugin was wrong. Changed to "editcatalogue", more convenient. * if the last field was an authority, the authority report generated a javascript error (going after array size) === AUTHORITIES === * fixing bug in summary (separator before subfield was in fact after) * fixing bug in authority order : authorities are not ordered alphabetically instead of no order. Requires all the dataset to be retrieved, but the benefits is important ! * no need to do a search on an authority when the authority has no MARC field (like EDITORS pseudo authority) === SERIALS === * Ordering bull-home better : by title === CIRCULATION === * minor bugfix : showing date in format from systempreferences === REPORTS === * Lot of bugfixes in borrower issues, catalogue issues, issues stats === ALL === * bugfixes in ldap auth (bugfixes from 2.2.4, 2.2.3 was not buggy) === OPAC === * adding dashes in isbn in opac-detail.pl * translation bug ISSN translated to ISBN in french , very annoying mistake ! + some other translations * ordering by acquisition date was buggy. IMPROVEMENTS === ACQUISITION === * added a menu & a screen to see late issues attached to a bookseller. === CIRCULATION=== * In overdue list, Added some filter features : - filter on borrower firstname, surname or cardnumber. **This can be discussed and changed** - filter on borrowercategory - filter on itemtype - filter on branch - show all current issues. * Added a reserve management page in circulation module. It basically displays all the reservations not cancelled. * Adding a systempreference to notice the library before departure of a borrower. when borrower leaves the library in less than 'NotifiyBorrowerDeparture', the circulation desk shows it. === CATALOGUING === * as the MARC editor begins to be really heavy, i've also added a marc_hide systempref. It hides all marc features not requested by libraries that want MARC but not too much. It hides MARC tag & subfield code, reordering buttons as well as indicators. by default, hide_marc is off === OPAC === * by default, recent acquisitions are done on 30 days. * New systempreference : OpacPasswordChange if set to Yes (default) the user can change it's password. If set to No, he can't. Useful for libraries with LDAP auth, where the password is checked in LDAP, not in Koha, thus Koha can't change it === SERIALS === * ordering lists by biblio title * when adding a subscription and searching a biblio, you can filter on itemtype (useful as libraries usually have one or few itemtypes specific for serials) -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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test
by Bruffey, Mark 16 Dec '05

16 Dec '05

Test once again; others see my posts, but I do not recv in outlook . . . . L. Mark Bruffey Director Library Services Central Baptist Theological Seminary 900 Forestview Lane N Plymouth MN 55441 763 417 8264 mbruffey(a)centralseminary.edu Central Seminary www.centralseminary.edu <http://www.centralseminary.edu/> Fourth Baptist Church www.fourthbaptist.org <http://www.fourthbaptist.org/> WCTS Radio AM 1030 Online www.centralseminary.edu/wcts *************************************** Have you experienced the good news? "Every one who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved!" [Romans 10:13] ***************************************

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Perl-ZOOM is a GO!
by Joshua Ferraro 15 Dec '05

15 Dec '05

Hi everyone, I'm pleased to announce that the first public release of the ZOOM-Perl software, distributed as the Net::Z3950::ZOOM module, was released and uploaded to CPAN yesterday. Thanks to Index Data, and especially Mike Taylor for their hard work on this module over the past few weeks. With this software release, we're ready for the next phase of Zebra integration, which will include using the Perl-ZOOM API to perform OPAC and Cataloging functions on a Zebra database. If you'd like to get involved in this process, you'll want to read through the ZOOM-Perl documentation here: http://search.cpan.org/~mirk/Net-Z3950-ZOOM-1.00/lib/ZOOM.pod Most of what we'll be doing is search and retrieve clients using the ZOOM class, which looks something like this: use ZOOM; eval { $conn = new ZOOM::Connection($host, $port) $conn->option(preferredRecordSyntax => "usmarc"); $rs = $conn->search_pqf('@attr 1=4 dinosaur'); $n = $rs->size(); print $rs->record(0)->render(); }; if ($@) { print "Error ", $@->code(), ": ", $@->message(), "\n"; } and updating records, using the ZOOM::Package class, which looks something like this: $p = $conn->package(); $p->option(action => "specialUpdate"); $p->option(recordIdOpaque => 145); $p->option(record => content_of("/tmp/record.xml")); $p->send("update"); $p->destroy(); Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

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Savannah News
by Joshua Ferraro 15 Dec '05

15 Dec '05

Hi everyone, Just a bit of news from Savannah, our project's code repository: <snip> Savannah CVS URL changed In our effort to better structure the Savannah system and get the necessary fundations for new features, all CVS-related services are moved to cvs.savannah.gnu.org and cvs.savannah.nongnu.org. You can use 'sv' instead of 'savannah' for short. cvs -z3 -d:ext:username@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/project co module_name cvs -z3 -d:ext:username@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/web/project co module_name </snip> There are some other changes related to anonymous check-out as well as how CVS/diff emails are being generated, etc. If you'd like more details, visit: http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=4168 Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

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Installing Koha HEAD (soon to be 3.0) Part 1
by Joshua Ferraro 13 Dec '05

13 Dec '05

Hi everyone, So, you want to get involved in Koha 3.0 development, but you're not sure how to install Koha HEAD right? Well now you're out of excuses :-). Here's a brief overview of the steps involved. 1. Install Koha 2.2.4 (or use an existing 2.2.x install, upgrading to 2.2.4 doesn't really matter). Ideally, this Koha will have data, if not, insert some MARC records or if you don't have any, ping the list and I'll send you a bunch. Remember, you have to be running the MARC=ON version of Koha (for now). NOTE: This will completely destroy your pre-existing Koha install, so use at your own risk, certainly do not do this on a production system! Again, DON'T DO THIS ON A PRODUCTION KOHA SYSTEM. (for those of you completely new, there are installation directions at http://kohadocs.org) 2. Download the latest CVS stuff from Savannah: bash# export CVS_RSH="ssh" bash# cvs -z3 -d:ext:anoncvs@savannah.nongnu.org:/cvsroot/koha co koha 3. Install MARC::File::XML bash# perl -MCPAN -e 'install MARC::File::XML' 4. Symlink your existing 2.2.x Koha to the CVS tree as described in the "Updating Koha" document: http://www.kohadocs.org/Updating_Koha.html 5. cd /path/to/my/cvs/koha (wherever your CVS version lives) 6. One of: bash# ln -s misc/zebra/usmarc zebra bash# ln -s misc/zebra/unimarc zebra (unless you're in France, you probably have usmarc records) 7. Now, you need to install zebra (http://indexdata.dk/zebra) 8. Create a zebra database (from within the misc/zebra/u(s|ni)marc dir) bash# cd /path/to/my/cvs/koha/misc/zebra/usmarc/ (or unimarc) bash# zebraidx init 9. run the updatedatabase script bash# cd /path/to/my/cvs/koha/updater bash# perl -I /path/to/my/cvs/koha updatedatabase 10. depending on how many records you've got, go grab a pizza and a movie and relax :-) Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

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Small contribution
by Andres Tarallo 12 Dec '05

12 Dec '05

Our librarians find annoying the fact that in big searches in the OPAC (more than 15 pages) only the first 15 pages are availible on the top. I've modified this. Now tehy can see at most 30 pages. The value is no more a hardwired constant, is a contact on the begining of the program. And we you reach the last apge (I've settted the value to 30) you are showed the next pages (ie 31, 32, 33). I've ported this from our installation to the last source from the CVS. Please test it thorugly. I hope to see it soon in the CVS. Andres

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News and a Request
by Joshua Ferraro 08 Dec '05

08 Dec '05

Hi everyone, Well, hope you're all enjoying our new home at Savannah: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/koha. I trust the transition was fairly transparent to most of you. If you haven't done so already, please sign up at savannah and send me, paul or chris your username and we'll hook you up. Now, on to some business. As many of you know, we're in the process of planning version 3.0 of Koha. The biggest component of the 3.0 release is replacing the 2.x series MARC-in-SQL style database with the Zebra indexing engine (http://indexdata.dk/zebra) Paul's already done quite a bit of work in HEAD, preparing things by getting rid of the marc-* tables, writing some configuration files for Zebra, and some wrappers for searching using Net::Z3950, and documentation on how to get Zebra running with Koha. In the past few months, we haven't seen much activity in HEAD, largely because we've been waiting for the new Perl-ZOOM API. Perl-ZOOM will replace the current Net::Z3950 module and will add a number of new features. The most important being the Database Management functions (add, delete, edit data in a Zebra database), which will give us a single API for searching, retrieving, adding, deleting and editing bibliographic data in Koha. So ... the good news is that Perl-ZOOM is nearly completed. We're expecting a public release by the end the second full week in December (Friday, December 16 at the latest). In the meantime, while we wait for Perl-ZOOM to be completed, we need to discuss what our final list of features will be for 3.0. I've compiled a list of features that we've discussed on the Koha 3.0 Roadmap: http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/koha_wiki/index.php?page=KohaRoadmap3.0 At the bottom, there is also a tentitive schedule in place. So, now, I need solid commitments and timelines for the various projects you're working on. I'd like to compile the final list and declare a feature freeze by the last week in December so we can begin to stabilize the 3.0 branch. It's going to be a busy first quarter of 2006 :-). Please send me (on or off-list) the list of things you're working on, and when you expect to have completed them, and I'll be sure they are added to the final Roadmap. As always, if you have any questions, let me know. Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

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serials & items (primarily for chris)
by Paul POULAIN 08 Dec '05

08 Dec '05

Hello everybody, One of my libraries would be happy with a new feature : creating items on the fly when a serial arrives. the item would have to contain : barcode / itemcallnumber / branch / itemnote iirc, chris, you told me you made something in this direction. Am I wrong ? do you plan to commit something about this ? otherwise, I could do it. Would be fairly easy I bet : * add a systempreference add / don't add item when recieving issues * if YES : add 4 inputs in the screen where the librarian recieves issues * when saving issue status, if a barcode has been typed : - create a hash - use MARCkoha2marcitem to create the MARC record for the item - NEWnewitem to create the item - that's all folks ! The second step, a little bit harder : save the link between the item and the serial issue (items & serials tables). That means we would have to create a new field in items table. And then, of course, use the link when showing the item in OPAC (like showing the serial issue number) Feel free to comment. PS : no need to do this in 2.2 atm, maybe just something to add to RoadMap for 3.0 ;-) -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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