Gavin McCullagh wrote: [snip]
So, is this all useless nonsense? Should I crawl back under that rock?
Definitely not. Now is exactly the right time to be thinking of these sort of things. We have a stable 2.2 branch which is proving to be pretty solid, and we are early in the development of 2.3 (which will be come 2.4 when its ready to be released). So now is the time to try stuff :)
I'm willing to roll up my sleeves and get at it but I'd like to know this work is useful and it would help to have someone known in the community to keep an eye on the code. As I see it this is a mainly sql task and there shouldn't be too many changes to the perl code itself but I'm not so familiar with the greater part of the project code so I'd rather have someone to look over my shoulder now and then.
The way we have it set up at the moment is that all commits to cvs get posted to a mailing list koha-cvs .. which allows all of the developers (or at least the ones subscribed) to see what each other are doing.
Here is an example I've just done in PHP on MySQL with a similar database structure. There are ~20K records.
http://simms.celt.dias.ie/~gavin/opac/
You can search the titles for 'gael*', the author for 'breatnach', keywords for 'royal' and 'ireland'. I have not yet implemented cross-linking. I'll take this down in a few days.
Looks good to me, take a crack... you'll learn that with the Koha project we arent precious about our code, we want to do the best we can so if people can think of improvements we are more than willing to try them out. Great to have you aboard and good luck :) If you let me know your sourceforge id, i can give you write access to the cvs tree and you can go for your life :-) Chris -- Chris Cormack Katipo Communications Programmer www.katipo.co.nz 027 4500 789