January 2006 - Koha-devel - lists.koha-community.org

question/feature request regarding items & issuing rules
by Cindy Murdock 16 Jan '06

16 Jan '06

Hi all, We've been figuring out how we want to set up our item types for our libraries, and I notice how the renewal limit, not-for-loan, and rental charge are all set in the itemtypes table. Wouldn't it make more sense to have these things set in the issuingrules table? This would make setting these rules on a per-library basis more flexible, especially for a loosely-federated library system like mine. :) Is there a reason these are in itemtypes and would it cause problems if they were moved? Cheers, c. -- _________________________ Cindy Murdock Network Administrator Meadville Public Library | Crawford County Federated Library System meadvillelibrary.org | ccfls.org

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Table Lock privilege for kohaadmin
by Stephen Hedges 16 Jan '06

16 Jan '06

Is there any reason why the kohaadmin MySQL account should not have the LOCK TABLES privilege on the Koha database? I've run into a problem with the koha.upgrade and the bulkmarcimport.pl scripts because kohaadmin cannot lock the tables. The problem may be more complex than this, but that's the error that DBI throws. (I'm using MySQL 4.1.10a, doesn't seem to matter if I set old-passwords or not.) -- Stephen Hedges Skemotah Solutions, USA www.skemotah.com -- shedges(a)skemotah.com

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Koha 2.2.5 is available for download
by Paul POULAIN 09 Jan '06

09 Jan '06

RELEASE NOTES ============= Koha is the 1st Open-Source Integrated Library System. Released at first in New zealand, in 2000 januaray, it is maintained by a team of volunteers from around the globe, the Koha system is a full catalogue, opac, circulation and acquisitions system. Koha 2.2 is more than 247 000 lines of code, developped by more than 30 differents developpers (excluding translators). With the 2.2 version, Koha is now a mature product, with a lot of nice features. It's used in more than 100 libraries, from all kinds (public, schools, search, religious...), of all size (from 1 to 8 branches, from 1000 to 300 000 items). The developpers tools have changed. Koha is now hosted by savannah. the home page of the project is now : http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/koha/ while you can download packages here : http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/koha/ ======== WARNINGS ======== * The librarian interface is tested only with mozilla/firefox. Should work (partially) with IE. OPAC should work fine with any navigator. * The installer is *wrong* on languages available. In this release, french & english are uptodate. Other language po files are provided in the package. If you update/complete one of them, please send it at paul.poulain @ free.fr, it will be included in a 2.2.4b release ! KNOWN BUGS : ****** Critical/blocking : none see bugs.koha.org for more information. Please report any problem in bugs.koha.org Apple users : it seems there is an annoying bug in firefox, that you can have in librarian biblio search : only the 1st MARC field list is available, the others can't be opened. The problem is related and fixed here : http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20051226091140372 ======= DIFFS ======= Diff 2.2.4 => 2.2.5 ******************* DB MODIFS : *********** DB structure : none DB content : none Koha opac stylesheets : none BUGFIXES === ACQUISITION === * suggestion/acquisition bugfixes : - 200 field is no more splitted in 2 parts - author is after title in UNIMARC (dirty code, 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) * when a budget has no line (or an outdated line) it does not appear anymore in acquisition * orders where always attached to the last budget line, not to their real line (=depending on date) === CATALOGUE === * There was an annoying bug in search when 2 search terms were separated by 2 spaces or an "empty character" (like .,; ...) : the search was truncated and the result not correct. === CATALOGUING === * Repeated subfield in authority were not being reported in the biblio while cataloguing * when AutoBarcode=ON and MARC=ON the barcode was not calculated automatically. Now, the barcode will be calculated (and any manual entry discarded during save) * added 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) * It was impossible to add a subfield with value 0. * additionalauthors were uncompletly deleted on biblio deletion. * (UNIMARC specific bugfix) when an editor is entered, with no ISBN, the collection plugin (225a) can find collections attached to the editor name. Note that if there are more than 1 EDITORS authority for a given editor, only the 1st will be used to create collection list. * when adding a biblio, after searching in DB and reservoir, the page manager in the result list was buggy (isbnsearch.pl) * bugfix in almost all unimarc plugins : under certain circumstances, for some digits, a value could be lost on modification (1 byte values mainly) * added a usmarc_field_952v.pl plugin (joshua) : Adds a function to autogenerate the date for dateaccessioned for usmarc * in MARC editor, if the last field of last tab was an authority, it was impossible to report the selected authority into the biblio. * deleted biblio/biblioitems/items tables had a not the same structure than their non deleted "sister". During update, a new tool modify automatically their structure to have deleted records correctly stored. === 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 ! * The "used in X biblios" button has been removed for EDITORS, as it's always 0 and does not work as EDITORS are pseudo-authorities === SERIALS === * Ordering bull-home better : by title === CIRCULATION === * minor bugfix : showing date in format from systempreferences * minor bugfix : the "edit borrower link in circulation screen was buggy === MEMBERS === === REPORTS === * Lot of bugfixes and improvements in borrower issues, catalogue issues, issues stats (not detailed, sorry, discover by yourself) === 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. === CATALOGUE === === 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 === MEMBERS === === 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 * New alternate stylesheet for OPAC : go to librarian interface >> parameters >> System preferences >> OPAC >> modify opacstylesheet and enter : /opac-tmpl/css/opac2.css === 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) === SYSTEM PREFERENCES === * The export tool has been improved a lot : the library can now select a branch, and itemtype or callnumber limits. Plus the export can be limited to X records (for testing purposes before a larger export) === ALL == * online help added for some screens. -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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cvs synchro between 2.2 and head
by Paul POULAIN 06 Jan '06

06 Jan '06

Hello koha devs, i just commited all fixes/improvements that are in koha 2.2.5 in head. Don't expect this synch to be bugfree, but i made some test anyway, it should not break too many things. -- 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 for monday
by Paul POULAIN 06 Jan '06

06 Jan '06

Hello, unless otherwise stated (a mail from owen mail, mainly ;-) ), Koha 2.2.5 will be available on monday. -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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cvs change log
by Paul POULAIN 04 Jan '06

04 Jan '06

Hello, the cvschangelog is calculated daily and available at : bureau.paulpoulain.com/cvslog/ (for both 2.2 and head versions) -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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Koha 3.0 and UTF-8
by Paul POULAIN 04 Jan '06

04 Jan '06

utf8 is a : go for beta test in HEAD. Some explanations of what i've made : - updater/updatedatabase => will transform all tables in innoDB (not related to utf8, just to warn you) AND collate them in utf8 / utf8_general_ci. The SQL command is : ALTER TABLE tablename DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci. - *-top.inc will show the pages in utf8 - THE HARD THING : for me, mysql-client and mysql-server were set up to communicate in iso8859-1, whatever the mysql collation ! Thus, pages were improperly shown, as datas were transmitted in iso8859-1 format ! After a full day of investigation, someone on usenet pointed "set NAMES 'utf8'" to explain that I wanted utf8. I could put this in my.cnf, but if I do that, ALL databases will "speak" in utf8, that's not what we want. Thus, I added a line in Context.pm : everytime a DB handle is opened, the communication is set to utf8. - how to deal with MARC records ? MARC records are in marc-8 encoding, stored in biblioitems.marc binary format, that is not modified by the alter table (fortunatly, as it's a binary format !). But... I created a marcxml column in this table, containing the XML output of the marc record (a duplicate of the raw marc record). I did not knew what it will be used for, but know I know : the utf8 move transform the marcxml column, and the catalogue is moved to utf8 (with MARCgetbiblio using marcxml instead of raw marc) ! The last question being : is biblioitems.marc (raw marc record) still useful ? I think no : - iso2709 is limited to 99999 char, specialised to MARC-8 encoding, binary. - XML has none of those limitations. Thus, my opinion is that we should get rid of iso2709 and use XML everywhere, except when exporting datas in iso2709 format. But internally, we should use only XML. Let me know if it works completly, correctly, poorly or not at all for you ! -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)

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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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