[Koha-devel] RM monthly newsletter #2 (2012 january)

[Paul Poulain]

Welcome to my 3rd RM monthly newsletter. There has been a *LOT* of
*important* things pushed this month.

Everybody should read this newsletter in detail.
If you're planning to submit patches, you *must*. If you're just a user
of Koha, there are some interesting announcements too, you can read it
as well !

==== Bugzilla news ====
There are 87 bugs waiting to be signed-off. That's too much ! and a
problem is that is seems that hard-to-test patches can be lost in the
wilderness for a long time. Small/easy patches are usually quickly
signed-off.
The patches to QA pile show a correct 30 patches. Unfortunatly, that's
the hardest ones too, as I QAed a lot of 'trivial' patches this month...

==== Bugzilla ====
Earlier this month Ian, our QA manager made important changes to our
bugzilla setup.
The "patch status" field has been removed in favor of the "status" field.
The previous "patch status" have all be moved to "status".
2 new status have been added:
  - in discussion = will be used when a patch need a deeper discussion
to see if it can/should be added into Koha. The discussion can be
functional (is the feature desirable in Koha ?) or technical (is the way
it's made OK ?) The "in discussion" bugs will be discussed on the
monthly meeting.
  - 'pushed to stable': pushed has been splitted in "pushed to master"
and "pushed to stable". The RMaint (Chris N. for now) will use "Pushed
to stable" when he pushed a patch to stable (3.6). The "pushed to
master" is used by me when pushing to master (for the future 3.8)

The only side effect of this bulkchange is that date of last change of
each bug has been reseted to the date of the bulkchange. That's annoying
if you want to see which patch to signoff is the oldest.

==== Coding guidelines ====
I've updated the code guideline page on the wiki
(http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Coding_Guidelines)

I've removed all deprecated guidelines, and added some that we already
use, and that were not written.
I've added a general rule for QA:

General rule: if you submit code that fixes an existing code that
violates those guidelines, the QA can still be passed. You don't have to
fix everything. If you want to fix more than just your fix, to respect
current guidelines, you're welcomed of course. But in this case, please
to it in a 2nd patch, to have reviewers being able to distinguish easily
what's related to your bugfix and what is related to your
guidelines-violation fixing.

==== Important technical patches pushed ====
Some important internal changes have been pushed.
Those change won't be visible for users, but are important for developers

=== Date formatting & displaying ===
Chris has written a nice Template::Toolkit plugin that will take care of
date formatting for you.

Before the patch, you had to format dates before sending them to the
template, something like:
    my $entrydate = C4::Dates->new( $data->{'entrydate'}, 'iso' );
    $data->{'entrydate'} = $entrydate->output("syspref");
    # entrydate is now available
Now, you still can do it that way, but that would be a really bad idea:
just send the date as it's provided by mySQL (iso format), and, in the
template, write [% MyDate | $KohaDates %]
don't forget to put [% USE KohaDates %] at the beginning of your page to
tell Template::Toolkit you'll use this plugin.

What must/can be done now is ... update all code & templates displaying
dates to use this plugin !

Bug 7444 has been created to reflect all the patches that will be made
to switch to KohaDates template.

*Coding Guideline rule*
  * all new code displaying date *MUST* use this plugin
  * existing code can still use previous option, but cleaning is highly
welcomed

=== Datatable jquery plugin ===
We've decided some months ago to get rid of the various jquery plugins
we use to display large tables, in favor of Datatable.
Datatable has been pushed into master, with a first page using it
(patron reading record), and some documentation on the wiki
(http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/DataTables_HowTo)

*Coding guideline rule*
  * all new code displaying potentially large tables *MUST* use this
plugin (preferably the "server side processing" option)
  * existing code can still use old plugins, but cleaning is highly
welcomed !

==== Important functionnal patches pushed ====
Some patches that contains important new features have been pushed.
Don't hesitate to test them again and again if you've a sandbox. They'll
be available in Koha 3.8

=== UnwantedFields in member entry (bug 6190) ===
A new syspref now let you choose fields that you don't want to have in
patron forms. A very interesting feature as there are *many* fields
available.
Note that this is a syspref, so you can't remove some fields for a given
category and keep it for another. But that's a nice first step anyway !

=== Acquisition changes ===
Some changes, coming from the stuff made by BibLibre for StEtienne
university have been pushed:
  * show cancelled order in basket page (bug 5358): after the list of
orders, you now also have the list of cancelled lines, on every basket
  * late order management (bug 5347): Koha now keep track of how many
claims you've made on a given order line, and the date of the last
claim. The default claim notification has been updated and your claim
will have to be updated when upgrading to 3.8

The breakdown of budget spending has also been reintroduced (Bug 929) :
on acqui-home.pl page, on each budget you can now see how the budget has
been spent.

=== Local cover images (bug 1633) ===
You can now upload images to your biblios, that will be displayed as
cover image. You can also zoom on the image, and, if you've uploaded
more than just one, see all of them. This feature can be activated on
staff and OPAC independantly.

=== j2a.pl script ===
The j2a.pl script, that is in misc/cronjobs was previously very basic,
upgrading Childs to Adult (hardcoded category) when they reached 18. The
script now has many new option to make it much more usefull

==== Hackfest in Europe ====
Again, in case you missed the news BibLibre (my company, in case you
don't know) organize a hackfest in Marseille in March. More information
at http://drupal.biblibre.com/en/blog/entry/2012-hackfest-in-europe,
feel free to join, all attendees will get a special thanks on this
newsletter after the hackfest. We already have Owen coming from USA,
Marc, coming from Switzerland, Katrin coming from Germany, Dobrika and
Marijana coming from Croatia, and -probably- Zeno coming from Italy.
It's still time to join, don't hesitate anymore !!!


See you next month for the #4 and in the meantime, happy hacking !!!
-- 
Paul POULAIN
http://www.biblibre.com
Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc
Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08