Hi all,

What do folk think about adding “web pages” via Koha Plugins?

At the moment, we can inject REST API routes and serve static files, but we don’t really have a way of creating web pages on the OPAC (or the Staff Interface) that can be interacted with by a user without plugin permissions.

At the moment, there are a few options for providing this functionality. You could create a custom page via opac-page.pl and inject Javascript using “opac_js”, but that involves some manual work from staff users. Alternatively, you could serve a HTML page from a REST API endpoint, but that’s a corruption of the REST API.

I suppose a Koha plugin could insert a page into the “additional_contents” table, although there doesn’t seem to be a robust machine friendly way of detecting if the page was added by a plugin. Plus it could only be referenced using an integer ID rather than a plugin namespace or shortcode. Maybe the answer would be to add a column to the “additional_contents” table? Something like “source”? (Although it would need to be more than “plugin” so that different plugins aren’t stepping on each other.)

But I think it would be useful to be able to add a Perl-backed page via a Koha plugin in any case.

David Cook

Senior Software Engineer

Prosentient Systems

Suite 7.03

6a Glen St

Milsons Point NSW 2061

Australia

Office: 02 9212 0899

Online: 02 8005 0595