August 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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New document on kohadocs
by Stephen Hedges 29 Sep '05

29 Sep '05

A new link to a document has been added to http://www.kohadocs.org -- "Gestion de la bibliothèque du LabSAD avec le logiciel Koha" by Caroline Naget (available in pdf format only). This document is in the General Information section because it covers several aspects of Koha: installing on Gentoo Linux, setting parameters, and use. -- Stephen Hedges Skemotah Solutions, USA www.skemotah.com -- shedges(a)skemotah.com

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Install Meeting, 2005-07-05 21:00 +0000
by MJ Ray 16 Sep '05

16 Sep '05

Apologies for the late notice: I had trouble sending to this list last week. Tomorrow (Tuesday 5 July) at 21:00 +0000 (UTC), in #koha on irc.katipo.co.nz, there will be an IRC meeting to discuss installer and upgrader development for koha 2.3. All welcome. Possible topics: 1. General structure of the installer and upgrader; 2. auto-install features; 3. installer localisation (Locale::MakeText is in perl 5.8 core) Roughly the first 5 or 10 minutes will decide the timetable and I hope the meeting will be about an hour. If you can email any other topics or background reading links to this list beforehand, I'd appreciate it. -- MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ http://www.ttllp.co.uk/koha/

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question about
by Spencer Anspach 13 Sep '05

13 Sep '05

In C4::Biblio.pm, the subroutine MARCmarc2kohaOneField is passed the current statement handle ($sth) but never uses it. Can anyone tell me if this is a left-over artifact of an earlier functionality? Or an area of future development? The reason I ask is that I've implemented non-filing indicators locally (it is far from elegant, but it works, barely), but in order to do so I needed the database handle ($dbh) in that subroutine. The only subroutine that calls it (MARCmarc2koha) has $dbh, so it wasn't any problem to change the first parameter being passed from $sth to $dbh, but I wondered if that was something that was going to break future planned functionality. I tried to read through the revision notes and comments, but I didn't see anything that pertained. Also, that subroutine isn't exported and the comments indicate it should only be used by MARCmarc2koha (within Biblio.pm), so it seemed pretty self-contained and a managable modification. Thanks, Spencer -- Spencer M. Anspach, Library Systems Analyst/Programmer Library Information Technology, Indiana University Library E456 phone: (812) 856-5318 Bloomington, IN 47405 fax: (812) 856-4979 sanspach(a)indiana.edu pager: (812) 335-7403

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some informations on item status
by Paul POULAIN 13 Sep '05

13 Sep '05

Hello, Following some IRC chat & joshua commits, here are some explanations about item status : "item status" covers 2 things : - what is automatically set - what is manually set what is automatically set => the position of the book regarding issuing. It means wether the book is on issue, waiting, or "available". There is no field the DB to store this : the issues table is searched everytime it's needed => the "on order" flag, that can be set only when there is no item for a given book, but an order placed on it (remember a book is immediatly created when you place an order, in MARC as well as in non-MARC DB) what is manually set => it's 3 different fields in items table : - notforloan - itemlost - wthdrawn Since Koha 1.x, all those fields have the following meaning : 0 means "no", and 1 means "yes". So notforloan=1 basically means item is not for loan and notforloan=0 means its not not for loan (= can be issued) In Koha 2.0, i've added a feature that works at least for notforloan and MARC=ON : you can define a list of authorized values that are integers and used in the MARC subfield that is mapped to items.notforloan. the rule being : 0 means "no" >1 means "yes". Thus, you can define why an item is "notforloan". Can be, for example "being repaired", or whatever you want. The consequence is that you can have notforloan meaning : 0 : available 1 : not for loan 2 : lost 3 : withdrawn 4 : being repaired 5 : ... and thus lost & wthdrawn fields are useless for me. HTH -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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Independed branch functions
by Owen Leonard 13 Sep '05

13 Sep '05

HDL, Can you give us all a summary of the new independent branch functions you've added recently? What kind of things does it allow and restrict? Thanks, Owen

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Boolean operators in koha opac search
by Partha Mukhopadhyay 13 Sep '05

13 Sep '05

Dear friends, Does KOHA support Boolean (AND, OR, NOT), relational (>, >=,<,=<,=) and positional (NEAR and PROXIMITY) operators in OPAC search? I tried to combine two keywords with simple AND, OR and NOT operator. But it is not working. Is there any symble to indicate these operator such as & for AND, | for OR and ^ for NOT? These symbols (&, | , ^) are also not working for combined search. Help me.... Parthasarathi Mukhopadahyay VU, DLISc, India -- India.com free e-mail - www.india.com. Check out our value-added Premium features, such as an extra 20MB for mail storage, POP3, e-mail forwarding, and ads-free mailboxes!

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z3950import.pl?
by Owen Leonard 13 Sep '05

13 Sep '05

Is z3950import.pl currently used by Koha? I was curious about the templates it calls, which look very out of date (only some cosmetic changes for the last few years). Could this script and the corresponding templates (under marcimport) be safely removed from HEAD? -- Owen

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Kea site for new Koha website
by Russel Garlick 31 Aug '05

31 Aug '05

Hi Guys, Third time is a charm on the CMS front.We have setup the templates that Shaun built in the Kea CMS. So we are ready to start populating with Content. Couple of things about Kea. DOCUMENTATION We have some user documentation for Kea on our website. http://www.katipo.co.nz/clients/helpdesk/keatutorials/ They are in dire need of updating, and we are working away at that. But the main difference you will notice is in the page editor itself. The Koha edit site is using a rich text editor based on Htmlarea. So whilst tutorials 2, 3 and 4 aren't much help anymore. Most of tutorials 1 and 5 remain relevant. Tutorial 1 http://www.katipo.co.nz/clients/helpdesk/keatutorials/tutorial1/ Tutorial 5 http://www.katipo.co.nz/clients/helpdesk/keatutorials/tutorial5/ EDITING I have made holder pages as per the site map ready to be populated with content. You can use either the Edit Content or Edit Source to enter content. Edit Content will take you to the Rich Text Editor, Edit Source gives you just that. EDIT CONTENT Anything that is highlighted blue is editable through edit content. Just click on the text and you are away. A word of warning - you can copy and paste directly from word, but this tends to go badly. The special word characters tend to be rendered badly. What we normally do is paste into notepad and then select and copy again into the editor. You lose all your formatting, but at least you lose all the bogus formatting too! EDIT SOURCE If you are more comfortable just editing the source code, then go for it. Look for the  and  tags, these denote your content blocks. Please don't view source in your browser, make changes and then copy into edit source - you will flatten all the includes, which will make it hard to apply site wide changes. TEMPLATES We have loaded two templates for starters. 1- plain-2column.txt - The FAQ page template 2- Plain Style - A very basic template complete with Latin holder text - see - http://koha2.edit.katipo.co.nz/legal-notices.html Shaun if you look at the source of the template files, you will see that they are a collection of Server Side Include calls. Bob has broken your template up into separate include files which can be found in /includes/structure/ The style sheets are /includes/css/ The homepage has been uploaded as a straight html file. MAKING A NEW PAGE - USING A TEMPLATE AND AUTO NAVIGATION So how to make a new page, in the file manager screen, enter a file name into the new file field (don't worry about a file extension). This will take you to a new page. Here you can enter the Page title (used for breadcrumbs and site navigation), description, keywords etc. I will do a session on the Page Reviews and Public Notifys on irc sometime. Just ignore these for the moment. The Auto Navigation Settings give you some control over how the page appears in the LHS nav. If the page title is really long you can give it a short name. The priority is used to change the order of the links in the side nav. The default is alphabetical. Changing the priority of a page to 1 will take it to the top of the LHS nav. If there are 2 pages with priority 1, then the order of the two pages is decided alphabetically. Let me know if you have any problems with the autonav. It has a couple of bugs in it that show their ugly head from time to time and there is a work around for these. The normally only show their head when a site is live. UPDATING THE LIVE SITE/TRIGGERING/NOTIFYING At the moment we have not connected this up to a live site. When we get a chance we will set up a test site for the edit site to trigger to. Till then, please don't worry about triggering/notifing pages. Triggering is a priveledge and at the moment you should all get a Notify button. This will send a message to me notifing me that you wish to trigger a page. MOVING FORWARD I will take a copy of this page and put it up on www.russandsarah.gen.nz/kohawebredev/ And finally a big pat on the back to Shaun, I think the site is looking good, and now we have a sorted out the CMS question, we need some content and then we are ready to go. So content writers - how are you all getting on?? I have probably missed some stuff in this email. Any questions about kea please email me. I'll try to be on IRC as much as possible, but email is the best way to get my attention. Cheers -- Russel Garlick Operations Manager Katipo Communications Ph: +64 4 934 1285 Fax: +64 4 934 1286 Mob: +64 27 537 1377 Skype: russelgarlick Web http://www.katipo.co.nz

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who is james mason ?
by Paul POULAIN 29 Aug '05

29 Aug '05

did I miss something or james mason is a new developper ? I also suspect it's a katipo guy ;-) -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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