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

UI commentary on new zoomopac
by Corey Burger 14 Jul '06

14 Jul '06

Hello all, Thought I would introduce myself before I start spouting off. I currently wear two major sets of "hats". The first is in the Ubuntu community. I am a longtime member of the Ubuntu Documentation Team, Marketing Team and have the unfortunately pleasure of leading the Ubuntu Canada team. My second hat is with Userful. Userful makes DiscoverStation, which is a Fedora-based (ick, I know) public computing distro. I am a sales person for them. Now that the introductions are out of way, I will dive into the meat of my message: The OPAC interface. All of the below comments are based off the zoomopac interface on http://zoomopac.liblime.com/ as of July 7th,2006 (in case somebody is digging through the archives for my words of wisdom^WWWinsanity) == Overall Goals == Any good UI makes easy things very easy and hard things less hard. It also emphasizes the common tasks over the uncommon. Blather aside, what does this mean? The following lack hard facts, but are gut feelings: * The most common thing somebody is going to be doing just searching. Enter term, hit enter * The next three most common things people search for are: Authors, Titles and Subjects, in no particular order. * Another common query I would say is "What boxes on X are in the branch I am in/going to, right now?" * Advanced searching beyond the above is going to be done by maybe 1:20, maybe even closer to 1:100 * Staff love advanced search interfaces. They do deal with it all day. They also want fast search interfaces == General UI comments == * Align text entry boxes, either right or left. Have the description tag beside them, not on top or the bottom == Search UI == * Search boxes have a common UI. It is a text entry field with the button with the word "Search" on it. Sadly, the new OPAC appears to have departed from this idea. * Drop down menus suck. They are hard to hit and hide information. Thus if we move Authors, Titles and Subjects, we need to have a something different. * Tabs are also bad, as they hide information. * AJAX is a must. This part is already done well * I thus suggest we have little "mini-tabs" above the main search bar. They are labelled: General (or some better term for all inclusive search), Authors, Titles, Subject. * Colours are good for reinforcing connected-ness, so the background of each of the mini tabs would be a different colour and as the user switched the minitabs, the box around the search entry field would change accordingly * The world is full of slow internet connections, thus we need to fool our users into waiting if the ILS is slow to respond. After they click search, the page should switch to a hidden div with the words "Searching" and an hourglass/busy symbol. Because this will have already been loaded, the ILS can take its sweet time in responding and the user will not get annoyed. * The [ ? ] takes me an IndexData help page, written by technical people for technical people. My eyes glazed over almost right away. You don't need help on the simple search page. It might be justified on the advanced page. == Non-search UI == This is the fluff around the search, login,etc. * There are two places to login to my account. The one on the right is fine * Viewing new additions should take to a page with a complete listing, newest at the top. After I am there I can search for specific branch/subject/author/etc. Attached is a png showing a rough mockup. I don't claim the mockup is even roughly complete, but it does show the general idea. Cheers, Corey

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Koha-BDF
by Roxana Luz Fleipaz 13 Jul '06

13 Jul '06

Dears I do not go so far as to understand, please I need a help. Is Koha-BDF commercial?, I think in Internet that the cost of Koha-BDF is 10.000 $SDD. Did there need to know which is the difference of KOHA of origin, and because to take a name with same but TV/radio commercial Koha-BDF?. I need to raise this system and not encuetro a solution. Thank you. PD:RL

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My Local Koha Installation and Demo installation On http://koha.liblime.com
by lalitanand dandge 13 Jul '06

13 Jul '06

Hi, I installed Koha on my linux system successfully, while studying the demo ( on http://koha.liblime.com) and my local installation i found that in catalogue while adding the empty biblio there are many more and additional fields in the Demo while lesser in my local installation. I also checked the version both are same (i installed koha2.2.5 and the about of demo also saying same). So this make me little confused, since i am new to the koha and also i am form the open source development and not have library management experience as such. So please anybody having any inforamtion regarding this kindly help. Also i searched for the properly documented (rather easy step-by-step) manuals for how to use and administer koha, but I am sorry i could not get that useful for me, so please also help in this regard. Thank you, Lalitanand. Project Engineer. -- "Talk is cheap. Show me the code. Think Open, use Open Source!" Visit & Register at http://www.ossrc.org.in

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Source Code
by Emiliano Marmonti 13 Jul '06

13 Jul '06

Hi Andres I was checking in my mail, and we sended to Joshua exactly a year ago (06.20.05), the entire source code and database schema. I really don't know which was the problem with the install or something else. Before the finish of the Physics Library Project, the source code was downloaded from many countries, many times as you can see in: http://biblio.fisica.unlp.edu.ar/cgi-bin/koha/opac-downloads.pl Actually this version is not downloadeable from this site. I will check with Physics Library and try to put for download. Regards and happy for your interest in Koha-BDF Emiliano.

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MARC Editor
by Joshua Ferraro 11 Jul '06

11 Jul '06

Hi all, In our continuing saga to fix the MARC editor, I inadvertantly reverted rel_2_2 to a non-broken state (well, non-broken for me), while meaning to sync dev-week with a known working copy (again, for me). It could be interesting to add each modification individually again to see which one causes problems, or, if you prefer Paul, go ahead and revert my recent commit and we can troubleshoot the rel_2_2 editor from there. Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT 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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one developer leaving project
by Pierrick LE GALL 11 Jul '06

11 Jul '06

Hi koha-devel, Near one month since my last message on the list. As some of you already know, I don't work at INEO media system any more. Just after the DevWeek in May (I had been working at INEO for 2 months and a half) INEO announced me they decided not to invest in Koha anymore. It was impossible to continue paying a full salary without immediate return on investment, even if this situation was planned to last at least 18 months. Instead of working full time on Koha, they proposed me to work only 1 day a week and to work on the other activities of the company the time remaining, mainly .Net development on proprietary softwares. Of course I was not interested anymore. I've decided to find another job, what I did, and left INEO media system in the middle of June. I've tried many times to reach my responsibles at INEO media system to know what to communicate concerning the position of INEO toward Koha, but it has been impossible to have this information in one month. I suppose INEO media system won't work with Koha anymore but I don't really know, to say the truth. Maybe one day a responsible from INEO media system will come here and explain his strategy. Thanks for the 3 months I've been working with all of you. -- Pierrick LE GALL http://le-gall.net/pierrick

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problem with using the value_builder plugins
by Robert Lyon 04 Jul '06

04 Jul '06

Hi I'm looking at using the /value_builder/ plugin feature of helping create MARC21 records using the form here /cgi-bin/koha/acqui.simple/addbiblio.pl and I'm wanting to know if the popup javascript functions related with them are meant to map data in the popup window to only one field in the MARC form or can one easily access repeatable subfields I'm wanting to add information into the 651a subfield from a plugin that has a bunch of checkboxes I can get the information added to the field 651a as a string like so -> Place 1|Place 2|Place 3 and on saving this will make a bunch of 651a subfields like so a Geographic name Place 1 a Geographic name Place 2 a Geographic name Place 3 but now how do i get the the clicking of the ... on the end of the field to grab not only the info in it's field but also the other ones related to the 651a subfield? any ideas Bob -- Robert Lyon Katipo Communications

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Panjabi In notes or/Title
by Ramandeep Singh 04 Jul '06

04 Jul '06

Hello All, I've got Koha 2.2.5 running on Linux. I am trying to put Panjabi (Panjabi Unicode) value into the notes field to store some information about the Panjabi book title. So I paste the Unicode value (ਰਮਨਿਪ) in Koha admin notes field. I then query the database to see the value stored. It looks like it has stored the html code equivalent i.e #223232;#34343;etc. I also noticed that it splits this whole value into multiple rows in the marc_* table values. so tag 500a will have multiple rows with the html code values above and it is split randomly. Next, when I go back to the admin interface--the notes field it repeated multiple times with the html code values and I cannot edit the original value I had placed. I am by no means an expert/adv on Unicode but have general understanding. I would appreciate any one's input in this. BTW, I did read the posts from the achieves that did mention how to get Chinese/Arabic in the titles and it seems to be working......i need to know how I can get Panjabi to work. Thanks! Raman -- ਰਮਨਿਪ ਸਿੱਗ Ramandeep Singh RamanTX(a)gMail.com

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Head & rel_2_2 merged.
by Antoine Farnault 03 Jul '06

03 Jul '06

Hi all, I 've just merged Head and rel_2_2 and i prepare a big commit soon. I think this merged version has no "Internal Server Error" but, as i'm new in the koha code, it's possible that i 've made some mistakes by resolving conflits between these 2 versions... I hope i haven't made too much errors and/or bugs ! Cheers, -- Antone Farnault antoine(a)koha-fr.org

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M:F:USMARC & UTF8 problems
by Tumer Garip 03 Jul '06

03 Jul '06

Hi all, It has been months since devel-week and we are still struggling with UTF8 problems. Anyone following the IRC may have noticed that with ZOOM now working and everything looked normal and UTF8 we had a display problem when accented characters were in the search term. This was occurring when the new version of MARC::Record (version 2) package was being used. This package is regarded as a MUST for our MARC8 to UTF8 conversions and also hopefully to handle UNIMARC correctly. Well after all this time and effort I can report that the handling of UTF8 within this package is buggy. For a reason I did not understand line 170-174 of USMARC.pm says: # if utf8 the we encode the string as utf8 if ( $marc->encoding() eq 'UTF-8' ) { $tagdata = marc_to_utf8( $tagdata ); } which simply means if you have an UTF8 marc record re-decode it to UTF8. Which in itself calls Encode::decode and changes everything to bytes. In simple terms it messes all the accented UTF8 characters you may have on your template. I do not know any need of usage for this conversion and especially in KOHA_head everything being UTF8 this definitely does more harm than good. I have corrected the error with this package and a copy is sent to Joshua to raise the question with the package maintainer. In the meantime I have added another functionalty of conversion MARC8-UTF8-MARC8 to this package so one can go MARC::File::USMARC::decode($marc,&\somefunction,$encoding,$normalize); Where $encoding could be "UTF-8" or "MARC-8" and the record will get converted to that encoding as it is decomposed. Rather than the current method of converting to XML and back to MARC in order to get this. The fourth argument(is 1 or 0) is a more complicated issue of composed(precomposed) and decomposed character sets. I will not go into details of this but I suggest you supply 1 to this argument when converting to UTF8. This will make sure you get composed characters which are more browser and XML friendly.(More info on this subject can be found at Unicode::Normalize and the at the links in document) This correction resulted in another problem solved. The issue of having to use LibXML (and a specific version of that) seems to have gone away. Your SAX filter may stay as PurePerl and still your XML wont break. (see the article by Joshua http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg01006.html) However extensive testing has to be done to make sure on this. An important note though. Whatever parser you use you must have PurePerl defined as one of those parsers in your ParserDetails.ini otherwise it will not work. I hope this problem is solved once and for all so that we can continue developing more ZOOM functionalty into KOHA. Cheers, Tumer Garip -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.392 / Virus Database: 268.9.8/380 - Release Date: 30.06.2006

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