March 2008 - Koha-devel - lists.koha-community.org

Status of Debian and Koha
by Vincent Danjean 05 Aug '08

05 Aug '08

Hi, I'm pleased to announce that most of Koha dependencies (as listed in Makefile.PL) are present and up-to-date in Debian. The only exceptions are: * XML::RSS: the package libxml-rss-perl is outdated but its maintainer has just accepted that the package will be maintained by the Debian Perl Group. So it should be ok very soon. * Zebra [and Koha itself]: they will need more work According to a recent post on this list, zebra seems to require a more recent version of ZOOM (or at least of libyaz) than the one currently in Debian: Makefile.PL (from Koha) requires ZOOM >= 1.16 that works with libyaz2 2.1.48. Both ZOOM 1.16 and libyaz2 2.1.48 are on my webpage and in Debian experimental. But newer versions seem to be required. There is good hope here again that we will be able to upload an up-to-date yaz package in a few weeks. Next step: packaging zebra and Koha... Best regards, Vincent -- Vincent Danjean GPG key ID 0x9D025E87 vdanjean(a)debian.org GPG key fingerprint: FC95 08A6 854D DB48 4B9A 8A94 0BF7 7867 9D02 5E87 Unofficial pacakges: http://www-id.imag.fr/~danjean/deb.html#package APT repo: deb http://perso.debian.org/~vdanjean/debian unstable main

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Z39.50 servers and encodings
by MJ Ray 26 Mar '08

26 Mar '08

What are possible values from libserver:8080/cgi-bin/koha/admin/z3950servers.pl?op=add_form&searchfield=UNIVERSITY%20OF%20YORK should I add a new one and how do I add a new one? z3950://libcat0.york.ac.uk:9991/YOR01 appears to be sending me ISO-8859-1 which C4::Charset::MarcToUTF8Record fails to decode because it's calling Encode::decode('UTF-8', ...) in there. What's the Right Way to fix this? Thanks for any help, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237

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Q: DebugLevel=2 and version list; do we want backtraces?
by MJ Ray 26 Mar '08

26 Mar '08

Hi all. Is anyone else with DebugLevel 2 (which I think is the default) in their system preferences seeing a list of versions when Koha errors? There's code for it in C4::Context but it doesn't seem to work for me. Is C4::Context->preferences() really accessible from handle_errors like that? I've copied the backtrace snippet from mod_perl_startup.pl on http://www.gluelogic.com/code/BitTorrent/ into my C4::Context and control it from koha-httpd.conf with a SetEnv KOHA_BACKTRACES line. Do we want backtraces like that? I think KOHA_BACKTRACES may be better than DebugLevel because then we still get them if the database is unreachable. Waiting for feedback, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237

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koha beta version
by Ignacio Javier 24 Mar '08

24 Mar '08

Hi all, and congratulations for beta version! I've started to inspect z3950 search, and my first impression is that the capability of perform the search completely in a new window, inline sorting of results, performance of searches, and granularity of searches (implicit author AND title) add a lot of functionality for the librarian , but I specially like the possibility of preview MARC records. I would **love** a similar inline javascript for pagination, and doing the limitation of records fetched at the ZOOM level. Possibly alowing it in the search interface via a combo box or similar, but I suppose (am I correct?) the trick is in alowing to maintain the zoom network connection enough time, or negotiate it... and in a way that timeout errors can be catched?. A minor, when trying to preview "Card" format, there is a Carp: Could not create file parser context for file "/usr/share/koha/intranet/cgi-bin/koha-tmpl/intranet-tmpl/prog/en/xslt/compa ct.xsl": No such file or directory at /usr/share/koha/intranet/cgi-bin/catalogue/showmarc.pl line 77 ...but easy solution, seems pointing to intranet cgi-bin, not templates directory, that's changing the xsltfile path (pointing to config('intrahtdocs') instead of config('intranetdir')), worked: my $xslfile = C4::Context->config('intrahtdocs')."/prog/en/xslt/compact.xsl"; Congratulations again! Ignacio Javier Gómez Rodríguez Analista - Programador Tfno: 902905590 - Fax: 981571425 ignacio.gomez(a)coremain.com www.coremain.com

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Announcing Koha 3.0 (Beta)
by Joshua Ferraro 23 Mar '08

23 Mar '08

Hi folks, I'm happy to announce that a packaged beta release of Koha 3 is now available. You can download from the usual location: http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00-beta.tar.gz http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00-beta.tar.gz.sig You can check the integrity of the package; either by verifying the provided GPG signature (.sig) or by comparing the MD5 checksum: 84f6ec3615155cfa755a9e7139bd07df koha-3.00.00-beta.tar.gz I've also tagged this in Git as "version 3.00.00 beta" v3.00.00-beta This is the second packaged release of Koha 3. Prior to the official stable release of Koha 3.0, software issues, bugs, and unimplemented features must be addressed. These are documented on Koha's Bugzilla: http://bugs.koha.org and organized on the 3.0 RM's QA notes Wiki page: http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:qanotes3.0 The release notes for this beta version are pasted in below, and will also on the koha.org website sometime over the weekend. Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro Koha 3.0 Release Manager ============================================================================== RELEASE NOTES FOR KOHA 3.0 ALPHA ============================================================================== Koha 3 is the next-generation release of the award-winning Koha open-source integrated library system. You can obtain Koha 3.0 Beta from the following URL: http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00-beta.tar.gz These Release Notes cover What's New in Koha 3, information about the new Revision control system (Git), and Version-release process, pointers to Download, Installation, and Upgrade documentation, a brief introduction to the new Templates, a call to Translation and Documentation writers, and finally, Known Issues with this version. ============================================================================== WHAT'S NEW IN KOHA 3? ============================================================================== 1. Zebra plugin - Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text indexing and retrieval engine. It supports large data sets (tens of millions of records) and includes support for SRU, Z39.50 and several query languages: CCL, CQL, and PQF. For more information about Zebra, please see: http://indexdata.dk/zebra Koha's new search engine, built on top of Zebra, supports features such as relevance ranking, field weighting, truncation, stemming, use of fuzzy operators, language-specific indexing, sorting, etc. Indexes are updated in real-time with circulation transactions, enabling limits by availability and statuses. Faceted refine-by limits are available from both staff and opac interfaces. For libraries that don't want the overhead of maintaing Zebra, Koha 3 ships with a NoZebra option, in which bibliographic and authority data is indexed in the RDBMS. 2. New installer - based on the common Perl module ExtUtils::MakeMaker, the new installer makes it a snap to get Koha running on just about any platform. The installer comes complete with a Developer's Toolkit target ('dev') that can be used to get a development environment linked directly to revision control, to support rapid prototyping and an agile development process. 3. Standard APIs - Koha 3 supports a number of important library search and retrieval standards and microformats, such as SRU/W, Z39.50 (http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/) UnAPI (http://unapi.info/) and COinS/OpenURL (http://ocoins.info; http://www.niso.org/committees/committee_ax.html) Also supported is the popular Internet standard: OpenSearch (http://opensearch.a9.com/) created by Amazon's A9. Records are stored internally in an SGML-like format and can be retrieved in MARCXML, Dublin Core, MODS, RSS, Atom, RDF-DC, SRW-DC, OAI-DC, and EndNote; and the OPAC can be used by citation tools such as Zotero. Creating new export formats is a trivial exercise in writing XSLT; records can be passed through XSLT transformations either directly out of the index, or via a separate parsing function. To retrieve and interact with Circulation and Patron data, Koha 3 includes support for 3M's Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP2), using the OpenNCIP libraries (http://openncip.org) There are also an ever-expanding set of native REST APIs to handle interoperability with external tools such as third-party cataloging clients. These APIs provide authentication as well as add/edit/delete control over bibliographic data within a Koha system. For more information, see: http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:web_services Koha 3 also includes pluggable authentication - easy integration with LDAP and Active Directory via the Auth_with_ldap module. The Amazon.com module can be enabled to enrich bibliographic data with jacket covers, professional reviews, ratings and comments from Amazon users, as well as point to 'Similar Items' within the catalog. OCLC's xISBN, and LibraryThing's ThingISBN can likewise be enabled to provide an 'Editions' tab on item detail pages. New with Koha 3 is service throttling for these services, to keep within subscription limits. 4. Cross-platform, multi-RDBMS, Web-server agnostic - Run Koha on the platform of your choice: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris. Koha 3 also includes better support for multi-RDBMS (MySQL 5.0 and PostgreSQL), and runs under Apache2, IIS, or the web server of your choosing. 5. Multi-lingual support - Koha was designed from the ground up for multilingual libraries. Koha 3 can handle Chinese, Japanese, and even right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew with ease (BiDi). Koha's index engine (Zebra) can handle record formats containing any UNICODE compliant script, such as Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese and Korean. Zebra has this support via the ICU libraries created and maintained by IBM. You can translate Koha into your language using the built-in translation tools, or by visiting http://translate.koha.org. 6. New templates - Koha's staff and patron interfaces are developed with a template system that's easy to theme. The default templates are composed of 100% valid XHTML and CSS. Koha aims to meet or exceed U.S. Government Section 508 and W3C's WAI-AA standards for sight and motor impaired individuals. All Javascript usage comes with fallback modes that work in any web browser. 7. Koha 3 has quite a few new modules, as well as enhancements to existing modules, including: news writer, label creator, calendar, OPAC comments, MARC staging and overlay, notices, transaction logs, guided reports with a data dictionary and task scheduler, classification sources/filing rules. ============================================================================== REVISION CONTROL ============================================================================== With Koha 3, we've started using a new distributed revision control system called Git; it's the same system in use by many other projects, including the Linux Kernel. To learn more about how to develop Koha using Git, please see the Wiki page: http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:git_usage ============================================================================== VERSION NUMBERING ============================================================================== With Koha 3, version numbering has been changed to use a method similar to Perl's: major.minor[.revision[.build]] * major: one digit * minor: two-digit * revision: two-digit * build: three-digit This beta release of Koha 3.0 is versioned 3.00.00.056. Every database change or significant enough code change requires an update to the 'build' number, and developers will be able to easily upgrade their systems using the built-in updater. Koha 3.0 Release Schedule: This beta release of Koha 3.0 includes the following general improvements over the alpha release on XXX: * General Bugfixing (everyone) * New API for item management (gmcharlt) * MARC21 Authorities (gmcharlt) * Improved I18N/L10N, lang detection (kados) * OPAC Templates re-design (oleonard) * Additional translations This beta release of Koha 3.0 will be followed by a stable release on Mar 15, 2008, including fixes to the following components: * General Bugfixing (everyone) * Sync the system preferences between dev_week, rel_2_2 and 3.0 (gmcharlt) * Additional Template improvements (oleonard) * Documentation and Translations (everyone) The final stable release of Koha 3.0 is now slated for March 15 2008 and will include bugfixes to 3.0 beta. Subsequent releases of 3.0 will be bugfix releases, and won't include any new features. New features will be available in Koha 3.2 and subsequent releases. ============================================================================== UPGRADING FROM A PREVIOUS VERSION OF KOHA ============================================================================== The upgrade process from a previous version of Koha is documented on the Wiki at the following page: http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=22_to_30 ============================================================================== TEMPLATES ============================================================================== You may have heard that the templates for Koha 3 have been re-skinned; there is also the start of a template style guide on the Wiki: http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:documentation:templates_style_guide Kudos to Owen Leonard and the Nelsonville Public Library for their contributions! ============================================================================== TRANSLATIONS ============================================================================== Koha 3 beta (this release) currently has complete translations for the following languages: OPAC: de-DE (German), el-GR (Greek), es-ES (Spanish), en (English), fr-FR (French) hu-HU (Hungarian), it-IT (Italian), pt-PT (Portuguese), tr-TR (Turkish), ru-RU (Russian), uk-UA (Ukranian) zh-Hans-CN (Simplified Chinese in China), zh-Hans-TW (Simplified Chinese in Taiwan) Staff Client fr-FR (French), en (English), hy-Armn (Armenian), ru-RU (Russian), uk-UA (Ukranian) zh-Hans-CN (Simplified Chinese in China), zh-Hans-TW (Simplified Chinese in Taiwan) Additionally, Koha 3 beta (this release) has partial translations for the following languages: OPAC: am-Ethi (Amharic), bg-Cyrl (Bulgarian), fa-Arab (Persian), fi-FI (Finnish) gl (Galego), he-Hebr (Hebrew), id-ID (Indonesian), ja-Japn (Japanese), kn-Knda (kannada), ko-Kore (Korean), mi-NZ (Maori), pl-PL (Polish), tet (Tetum) Staff Client: de-DE (German), el-EL (Greek), es-ES (Spanish), hu-HU (Hungarian), ja-Japn (Japanese), tr-TR (Turkish), The Koha Team welcomes additional translations; please see http://www.kohadocs.org/usersguide/apb.html for information about translating Koha, and join the koha-translate list to volunteer: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-translate ============================================================================== DOCUMENTATION ============================================================================== User-contributed documentation for Koha 3 is available on the Koha Wiki (http://wiki.koha.org) The Koha Team welcomes documentation contributions; please join the Koha-devel list to volunteer: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel ============================================================================== KNOWN ISSUES ============================================================================== Known bugs are documented on the Koha wiki: http://bugs.koha.org and at the 3.0 RM's QA notes Wiki page: http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:qanotes3.0

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Hello, Koha!
by Huang Tao 22 Mar '08

22 Mar '08

Hi everyone, I'm Tao from Shanghai, China. I started to use Koha about one year ago when I planned to establish a small library in my company. But I'm only a part-time librarian:) I found that Koha was interesting and powerful. I have had this dream for about several months: Every school in China can use Koha as their electronic library. You may have known or not yet, in some regions of China, the schools there don't have enough fund to afford commercial library software. Koha seems to be the best choice for them. However, the language maybe becomes the biggest problem when they try to use Koha, although Koha have been partly translated into Chinese. That's why I join this list. First I am willing be a translator, then I will make a wonderful Chinese document for Koha. You guys are the most intelligent and experienced. Please give me suggestions and help to make my dream come true! Many Thanks, Tao Huang

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koha 3 alpha - opac holds and zebra autoindexing
by Ignacio Javier 20 Mar '08

20 Mar '08

Hi developers. Two questions, about koha 3.00.00.060: 1) In Opac-reserves: When done a hold over an item the message outputs "You already have a hold placed on this item", but logic seems not distinguish between a self-hold and another users hold. But in administration there is a system to assign priorities to holds. Is not the same underlying logic for both? 2) Zebra integration: The mechanics of koha -> zebra auto indexing continues to seem obscure. Is there any way to do autoindexing without recurring to the crontab script /usr/share/koha/bin/cronjobs/update_items.pl? Thanks. Ignacio Javier Gómez Rodríguez Analista - Programador Tfno: 902905590 - Fax: 981571425 ignacio.gomez(a)coremain.com www.coremain.com

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What is 'URLLinkText'
by Nicole Engard 17 Mar '08

17 Mar '08

I'm working on the manual - as you know and I came across the preference for 'URLLinkText' which says "Text to display as the link anchor in the OPAC" I'm not sure what this is or how to write it up - can someone explain? -- Nicole C. Engard Open Source Evangelist, LibLime (888) Koha ILS (564-2457) ext. 714 nce(a)liblime.com AIM/Y!/Skype: nengard http://liblime.com

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Question about System Preferences
by Nicole Engard 17 Mar '08

17 Mar '08

Hello developers, Quick question. I'm writing the manual for v.3 - but on the OPAC tab under General Preferences there are two options that confuse me. There is AmazonSimilarItems and OPACAmazonSimilarItems. What's the difference? At first I thought the first one was for the staff client - but then why is it on the OPAC tab? Can you clarify so I can word it properly in the manual? Thanks! -- Nicole C. Engard Open Source Evangelist, LibLime (888) Koha ILS (564-2457) ext. 714 nce(a)liblime.com AIM/Y!/Skype: nengard http://liblime.com

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IMPORTANT: Upgrading to Amazon.com Associates Web Service 4.0
by Joshua Ferraro 16 Mar '08

16 Mar '08

Hi folks, I just pushed up an important patch for all things Amazon ... please see: http://git.koha.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=Koha;a=commit;h=75a883f06ebd02f5ea… Or read below. NOTE: This has not been updated in rel_2_2 or dev_week, so Amazon Web Services will cease to function on the 31st of March! IMPORTANT: Upgrading to Amazon.com Associates Web Service 4.0 As announced this past February, Amazon.com will no longer be accepting web services requests to Amazon E-Commerce Service (Amazon ECS) version 3.0 beginning on March 31, 2008. This patch upgrades to Amazon.com's Associates Web Service 4.0 for the following components: 1. Amazon.com Locale support for: Canada, Germany, France, Japan, UK, and US (see the new syspref called AmazonLocale) 2. Jacket Covers 3. Editorial Reviews 4. Customer Reviews 5. Amazon.com Similar Items The following changes MUST be made to continue using Amazon.com content: 1. Delete the system preference: AmazonDevKey (AmazonDevKeys used with AmazonECS 3.0 are no longer valid) 2. Add the system preferences: AmazonLocale, AWSAccessKeyID NOTE: steps 1, 2 are done by the web installer 3. Verify your AWSAccessKeyID: You may already have an Access Key ID. You can access your Access Key ID by going to http://aws.amazon.com, pointing to Your Web Services Account, then clicking View Access Key Identifiers. Depending on when you signed up for ECS 3.0, you may need to re-register for an AWS account, which includes an Access Key ID. 4. Enter your AWSAccessKeyID in the Koha syspref called AWSAccessKeyID For complete details on the changes in Amazon.com Associates Web Service 4.0, and the migration process, please see: http://tinyurl.com/ysorqy Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE CEO 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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