Hi all, I've just cleaned up the naming conventions and some of the code and documentation issues in Biblio.pm in dev_week. My goal was to make some sense of the sheer volume of code, weed out the unused and useless functions, and re-name the used functions according to our coding guidelines. I didn't intend to do this originally for dev_week but unfortunately I just couldn't work with client requirements with the code in such an unreadable state. Toins, feel free to update rel_3_0 with my changes. Just a quick update on the current state of dev_week: 1. The searching options have been greatly expanded. If you haven't looked lately, you'll want to check out the latest record.abs, bib1.att, ccl.properties files: a. The dev_week API uses CCL as the default query language for interaction between the scripts and Zebra, though it does support CCL and PQF if passed ccl= or pqf= as the first part of a query. b. Getting your records up to snuff might be the most difficult part of a migration process. At some point soon we're going to need to put together a cataloging guide for catalogers using Koha to help maximize Koha's capabilities. in the meantime, expect to spend some time feeding your records through some pre-processing scripts. c. There are internationalization issues with dev_week that I haven't had a chance to explore ... also no support for UNIMARC yet, but I think paul and hdl are working on this. I expect once a few of my clients' systems go live I'll have some room to breath and take a look at these issues. 2. Items data is no longer updated on-the-fly for circulation -- it's just too much of a performance hit. There's a batch script for keeping the index up to date that you can run every 5 minutes or so to keep things up to date. 3. I removed all the proc-hungry functions in circulation and turned on warnings. Speed is up at least 80% from rel_2_2, and that's without mod_perl turned on. 4. I'm considering eliminating the old search API from the Intranet rather than maintain a wrapper for it. If anyone has any objections, speak up quickly :-). 5. I'm planning to remove additionalauthors and bibliosubject from dev_week because we've created some better ways to handle repeatable data by pulling it directly from the MARC (and FYI: additionalauthors and bibliosubject don't work as advertised in rel_2_2, but that's another story :-)) 6. This evening I'll be taking a look at the rel_3_0 code for reserving specific items and if it's stable, merging it into dev_week. 7. NPL will be doing user-testing of the Intranet tomorrow in anticipation of their go-live date in early October. I'll post the results of this test as soon as it's completed. 8. Authorities management is currently broken in dev_week, but I plan to fix it asap. 9. I've done something potentially confusing related to itemtypes in partial fullfillment of a NPL's need for a smaller set of circ rules without losing all their others. What I've done is to create an authorized value called CCODE that is hard-coded in the code to appear as a search point. CCODE is the old itemtype for NPL and NPL uses a new set of itemtypes for actual circulation rules. However, I may need to adjust how circulation rules are applied to allow item-level circulation rules (so that for instance, a record can have multiple items, each with different circ rules) which is required by almost every US Public library. I will post more about this issue as soon as I have a plan -- ideas are welcome :-). 10. Owen and I are going to begin using bugzilla to track issues with dev_week now that things are stabilized and will be using the rel_2_4 branch. 11. Migrating from a previous version of Koha to dev_week is nothing short of a nightmare :-). In addition to the need to fix broken records and normalize existing records, there's the added burden of dealing with improperly encoded records. These issues need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis because of the diversity of platforms out there. There's also an incredible learning curve for Zebra, both in terms of installation (ie, getting your data into zebra and having it run), and customization (ie, getting it to search what and how you want). Just a heads up for any of you looking to try this out. Well, that's all for now ... have a good rest of the weekend :-). Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS