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

New Feature: Zebra Plugin
by Joshua Ferraro 06 Apr '06

06 Apr '06

Hi all, If you've been following the development of late you probably know we've been working hard on getting a Koha Zebra Plugin ready to allow libraries to have the stability of the rel_2_2 series (soon to be rel_2_4) and the speed and search flexibility of Zebra. The plugin is finally here, and has reached a state of maturity suitable for public consumption. There's even an install doc: http://www.kohadocs.org/Installing_Zebra_plugin.html So please, if you have a spare test server, give it a shot. Let us know what you think. Your feedback will be invaluable as we move towards 3.0. 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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New IndependantBranches feature.
by Henri-Damien LAURENT 06 Apr '06

06 Apr '06

You all know IndependantBranches feature and its influence on Acquisition. Now, when IndependantBranches is set, a new control on circulation has been designed for 2.4.X It prevents a librarian from a branch to issue items held by other branches (unless librarian is a superlibrarian). If he tries to do so, an error message is displayed. -- Henri-Damien LAURENT

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pagination bar
by Pierrick LE GALL 06 Apr '06

06 Apr '06

Hi koha-devel, 2 days ago, I've commited a new function pagination_bar in C4::Output module (was it the right place?). This function builds the HTML code of a pagination bar: CVS Log> improved: C4::Output::pagination_bar builds an HTML pagination CVS Log> bar with no language dependency. This function hugely CVS Log> simplifies templates and offers a standard pagination method. CVS Log> This function also improves preformances. The idea is to always use the same function to create a pagination bar. The pagination bar will always look the same. What I've seen so far in templates is N pagination bars, each one using a slightly different algorithm. One pagination bar was even picture based! (limited to 16 pages). So far, only 2 pages are using the new pagination bar : authorities/authorities-home.pl (for search results) and admin/stopwords.pl. You can find required code in the corresponding files. You'll see it's very simple, you just need to give the URL for each link, the name of the offset/page/startfrom URL parameter, the number of pages and the current page number. Cheers, -- Pierrick LE GALL INEO media system

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MySQL specific queries
by Pierrick LE GALL 06 Apr '06

06 Apr '06

Hi koha-devel, Working in admin/stopwords.pl, I've found an SQL query I didn't know : "REPLACE stopwords (word) values (?)". I've searched in my MySQL cookbook and found what was the purpose of this statement (it's great by the way, too bad I didn't know it, it would have saved me many code lines). What the cookbook also told me is that "INSERT IGNORE" and "REPLACE" are MySQL specific statement. Maybe we already use "SELECT ... LIMIT X,Y" but this one is much more difficult to /translate/ into standard SQL. What is the official coding guideline concerning SQL queries? Can we use such specific statements? Cheers, -- Pierrick LE GALL INEO media system

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Koha Foundation : Librarians comments
by Irma Birchall 05 Apr '06

05 Apr '06

Hi all, As promised, here is a short summary of comments received from a few librarians I spoke with, who have been involved in the evaluation and selection of a new ILS for their library, in the past 5 years. They all mention how challenging and time consuming a task it was. Especially for syndicated libraries. Factors that have been mentioned regarding the adoption of proprietary software over open source ILS are: * Not knowing of the existence of any open source, high-quality ILS. Koha needs marketing! * How could they have determined whether the OS ILS is mature and "business ready" enough for their purposes? * Is there continuum in the quality of the code through all the functionalities? * How can one rate this OS application when no other library in their district or network uses this OSS. * Longevity: Projects backed by commercials companies are seen to have more longevity. * Support: commercial software vendors have support staff dedicated to helping customers solve problems with the product. For busy librarians, this was the main benefit in using proprietary software. * Rapid updates: libraries struggle anyway to keep up with change. Don't open source projects all follow the "Release Early, Release Often" paradigm? Some functions might need upgrading but the rest is just fine. How would that work? * These librarians accept: closed source code, having limited influence over roadmap, high costs, and limitations in functionality. * Traditionally, libraries have depended on proprietary software despite their limitations. There was no quality alternative. * These libraries or their parent organizations have no clear IT strategy regarding the use or non-use of open source application software. Regarding Koha starting a Foundation or perhaps becoming part of an existing one: a few of the thoughts expressed * The response was positive when I mentioned that Koha is now 5! Multilingual and used in libraries around the globe. * They would feel more comfortable adopting an open source product if it had published books/manuals/documentation this would be seen as a strong indicator of the software's level of maturity and adoption. The Foundation could publish these. * How active and lively is the Koha community? Being part of a Foundation could add to the expertise to the Koha community. * Becoming an independent foundation was viewed as a confirmation of professionalism and longevity. Hope that helps, Irma

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Meeting Minutes, etc
by Joshua Ferraro 04 Apr '06

04 Apr '06

Hi all, Below are the meeting minutes for April 03, 2006. Next mtg is on April 10th, 2006 at 19:00 GMT (meeting time adjusted this week for the sake of EU folks). Meeting Minutes for April 03 2006 Present: kados,pierrick,hdl,paul,shedges,tumer,slef,thd Meeting Agenda: http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/koha_wiki/index.php?page=AgendAndNotes06apr03 NEWS AND QUESTIONS We welcomed two new official Koha developers: Pierrick : QA Manager, will be handling Quality Assurance Tumer : Release Assistant, will be helping kados in planning and programming for the 3.0 release New Wiki: wiki.koha.org has been set up, based on dokuwiki. Pierrick volunteered to migrate our data from the old wiki. Slef has editing powers for koha.org now, if you have changes you'd like to suggest send them his way Once the data has been migrated, kados will announce it on koha-devel and ask whether folks would like it styled, etc. Slef will be working on a new blog aggregator site and the url will be blogs.koha.org Pierrick has proposed installing an extension manager so that users can easily upload/download modifications that are not part of the official code base. He suggested one based on PEM, a project he is an active developer of. https://gna.org/projects/pem/ Pierrick will install it and we'll link to it from the main koha site. PERL-ZOOM PLUGIN / KOHA 3.0 plugin development complete, couple of minor things to wrap up tumer has agreed to share his code which includes many nice features related to Zebra that we'll want to include in 3.0: boolean searching password protected edits circulation update to bib records too many other features to mention tumer will send his code to Chris who will integrate into the plugin UNICODE SATUS FOR HEAD kados didn't have a chance to check into this, he'll try to get to it this week. 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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koha 3.0 installer toughts and suggestions
by Paul POULAIN 04 Apr '06

04 Apr '06

Hi, I was wondering last week why ppl think Koha is so complex to set up working. I think I have found at least one good reason : the installer mixes technical (computer geek) questions and functionnal (librarian) questions. It ask for : mysql password, koha directory, apache user name... questions that a librarian often can't answer. Then, it ask for "MARC flavour", "authority framework", ... questions that a computer guy can't answer either. So, I think that for koha 3.0, we should completly separate both. The functionnal install (marc flavour...) being done in a webbased interface, once koha has been set up by the sysadmin. just my 2cts on this topic -- Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT Consultants indépendants en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org)

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koha 2.4.0 roadmap
by Paul POULAIN 04 Apr '06

04 Apr '06

Hello everybody, Koha 3.0 is almost here, but Koha stable must not be forgotten. I think 2.4.0 could arrive soon now, unless someone told me that he has urgent bugs to fix. The release notes have been updated on CVS (misc/release_notes/release_notes_2.4.0) Feel free to read & modify them, my english still being not my native language ;-) I'll request french mailing list for some tests on my computer with UNIMARC. If everything goes well, Koha 2.4.0 could reach us just after easter (april, 18th) -- Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT Consultants indépendants en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org)

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MARC Editor Visibility
by Joshua Ferraro 03 Apr '06

03 Apr '06

Hi all, thd and I have introduced some additional complexity into the MARC frameworks that offers a more complete handling of tag and subfield visibility. It's completely backwards-compatible so if you're happy with your current visibility options you don't need to do a thing and everything will behave exactly as it did before. First, I should introduce the problem: with the old scheme, there was a flag (INT(1)) that allowed hiding a subfield in the OPAC. You could also set a subfield to 'ignored' which was used for the special tags/subfields whose values are managed internally (e.g., 090). This would probably have sufficed but for the fact that thd has been working on a complete 'Standard MARC21 Framework'. In testing this framework (which includes 2/3s more fields than 2.2.5's default framework), we discovered that it was unusable due to long page loads (it's really quite a huge form with about 3,500 fields defined). (just to give you an idea of how slow it was, it took about 90 seconds to load a blank 'addbiblio' page and about 2-3 minutes to save a populated record). In addition, there is the problem of usability. With so many tags and subfields on a page it's very difficult to identify the most commonly used fields -- they are lost among the uncommon and rare fields. So we set out designing a 'visibility scheme' with three basic goals: 1. prevent very rare tags/subfields from being loaded into the MARC editor by default, but allow the user to add them if needed (with a page reload) and _definitely_ load them if they already exist in a record (ie, _no_ data lost when using the MARC editor). 2. allow uncommonly used fields to be collapsed and expanded quickly and easily without a page reload. 3. preserve the legacy 'hidden' functionality so the new framework isn't required for the upgrade to 2.2.6. As it turns out, there are quite a few possible visibility conditions that should be properly dealt with in a future version of Koha. Using the current framework's 'hidden' database definition (INT(1)) we can account for up to 19 such conditions (values -9 thru 9). Given that limitation as well as our current time constraint, we identified 17 conditions that will be defined in the new 'Standard MARC21 Framework' plus a 'Flag' condition that can be used to flag subfield definitions that will need to be revised when the framework can handle more conditions (ie, in 3.0). The scheme we devised is the following: ( ! means 'not visible' or in the case of Collapsed 'not Collapsed') -9 => Future use -8 => Flag -7 => OPAC !Intranet !Editor Collapsed -6 => OPAC Intranet !Editor !Collapsed -5 => OPAC Intranet !Editor Collapsed -4 => OPAC !Intranet !Editor !Collapsed -3 => OPAC !Intranet Editor Collapsed -2 => OPAC !Intranet Editor !Collapsed -1 => OPAC Intranet Editor Collapsed 0 => OPAC Intranet Editor !Collapsed 1 => !OPAC Intranet Editor Collapsed 2 => !OPAC !Intranet Editor !Collapsed 3 => !OPAC !Intranet Editor Collapsed 4 => !OPAC Intranet Editor !Collapsed 5 => !OPAC !Intranet !Editor Collapsed 6 => !OPAC Intranet !Editor !Collapsed 7 => !OPAC Intranet !Editor Collapsed 8 => !OPAC !Intranet !Editor !Collapsed 9 => Future use With this scheme, it's quite simple to check for the most important cases: *if (odd) { collapsed } *if (even) { !collapsed } if (>=0) { hidden in OPAC } if ((<=-4)||(>=5)) { not in the editor unless exists or is added} Those four checks take care of all the goals we set out to achieve. Of course, there are finer distinctions to be made, but we'll leave that for a future version. So just to clarify, we've implemented a subset of the scheme we devised -- a subset that doesn't comprimise where it counts (ie there won't be any data loss as with Koha 2.2.5). If you want to try out the new system feel free to use LibLime's demo: http://koha.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/acqui.simple/addbiblio.pl You'll notice that some tags (take 040 as an example) are listed but the subfields within them aren't -- simply click on the little + graphic to expand the fields (no page load) Likewise, some very rare tags/subfields don't appear by default. However, if you do a Z3950 search for a record and one contains them they will appear when you import the record (they will also import if they exist in records in the database). 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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Koha Developer Meeting Notes
by Joshua Ferraro 02 Apr '06

02 Apr '06

Hi all, MEETING NOTES FOR MONDAY MAY 3rd (20:00 GMT) Meeting Agenda: http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/koha_wiki/index.php?page=AgendAndNotes06mar27 Present: chris,russ,hdl,paul,owen,thd,kados,slef Discussed UNICODE Status pierrick has been running utf-8 tables with no problems; kados will confirm it works for him as well thd reminded us that uft-8 doesn't work in every browser so we need a solution for such cases Zebra Integration (CQL in Koha) chris has been working on SearchMarc.pm getting the plugin working SearchMarc.pm is a drop in replacement for the SearchMarc.pm in 2.2.x PROG Template status opac PROG templates committed, mostly done, owen will continue to work on improving them RoadMap We need a plan for what we're going to do Developer's Week we need some fancy templates for the conference to demo perl-zoom chris suggested having 2 kohas running on the same machine, one with zebra, one without Program for KohaCon to be developed (done on the wiki already) slef asked why dates for kohacon were chosen for beginning of may: reason was that kados was going to be in Geneva already so it was convenient KohaCon to be announced on lists Problems with koha.org's accessiblity discussed and (hopefully) resolved -- 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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