[Koha-devel] News and a Request

[Joshua Ferraro]

Hi everyone,

Well, hope you're all enjoying our new home at Savannah: 
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/koha. I trust the transition 
was fairly transparent to most of you. If you haven't done so 
already, please sign up at savannah and send me, paul or chris 
your username and we'll hook you up.

Now, on to some business. As many of you know, we're in the process
of planning version 3.0 of Koha. The biggest component of the 3.0
release is replacing the 2.x series MARC-in-SQL style database with
the Zebra indexing engine (http://indexdata.dk/zebra). Paul's already
done quite a bit of work in HEAD, preparing things by getting rid of
the marc-* tables, writing some configuration files for Zebra, and
some wrappers for searching using Net::Z3950, and documentation on
how to get Zebra running with Koha.

In the past few months, we haven't seen much activity in HEAD, 
largely because we've been waiting for the new Perl-ZOOM API. 
Perl-ZOOM will replace the current Net::Z3950 module and will add a
number of new features. The most important being the Database
Management functions (add, delete, edit data in a Zebra database),
which will give us a single API for searching, retrieving, adding,
deleting and editing bibliographic data in Koha.

So ... the good news is that Perl-ZOOM is nearly completed. We're
expecting a public release by the end the second full week in 
December (Friday, December 16 at the latest).

In the meantime, while we wait for Perl-ZOOM to be completed, we
need to discuss what our final list of features will be for 3.0.
I've compiled a list of features that we've discussed on the Koha 
3.0 Roadmap: 
http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/koha_wiki/index.php?page=KohaRoadmap3.0

At the bottom, there is also a tentitive schedule in place.

So, now, I need solid commitments and timelines for the various 
projects you're working on. I'd like to compile the final list and 
declare a feature freeze by the last week in December so we can 
begin to stabilize the 3.0 branch. It's going to be a busy first 
quarter of 2006 :-). Please send me (on or off-list) the list of
things you're working on, and when you expect to have completed
them, and I'll be sure they are added to the final Roadmap. As
always, if you have any questions, let me know.

Cheers,

-- 
Joshua Ferraro               VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS