[Koha-devel] RFC: Plugins QA

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 8:30 AM, Kyle Hall <kyle.m.hall at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's pretty awesome! I didn't know there were that many people interested
> writing plugins!

Well, there's clearly at least one. :)

More seriously, I don't know how much interest there is overall, but
for the plugin feature to be maintainable in the long term, I think it
needs relatively broad use.

> The plugins system isn't capable of this kind of functionality, so I don't
> think we'll have to worry about that.

Plugins have unrestricted access to the database, right?  Even if one
couldn't readily write one that interjects itself into the loan rules
calculating, unrestricted database access means that plugins have the
potential to intermingle with core functionality.

>> - Supporting library workflows that vary by country
>
>
> I'm not sure what this means, but I don't see any problem with it ; )

What I meant by this is that a plugin could be all about the American
workflow, or all about the French workflow, and not care about
implementing a broadly usable feature.... and that would be OK.

>> One thing that just occurred to me is that in addition to distributing
>> KPZs, we should encourage plugin authors to lay out their plugins in
>> such a way that they can be readily converted to Debian packages.
>
>
> This is something I hadn't thought of. So, my interpretation would be if you
> are running Koha from a debian package, you could install  Koha plugins from
> packages as well? This is certainly a cool idea.

Right.  For example, Debianized plugins could take advantage of APT
dependency management.

> Here's what I've done so far:
> http://git.bywatersolutions.com/koha-plugins.git

Thanks for the link.

> MARC Checker - This plugin runs each record in the Koha database through
> MARC::Lint and tells you how terrible your marc records are ; )

This looks like a good example of where I think a plugin shines:
running reports that need special handling beyond what SQL gives you.

It would, of course, be nice if MARC linting were available directly
in the Koha MARC editor, but the existence of the plugin doesn't
preclude developing that in the future.

> Force Delete Record - Sometimes a record gets corrupted so you cannot even
> view the record in Koha ( and thus cannot delete it ). This plugin allows
> you to forcefully delete a record by biblionumber.

I'm getting a bit of a twitch here -- I see the utility of this as a
workaround, but I hope that this plugin has a very short life on
account of the underlying bugs getting fixed.

> Rolling Hard Due Dates - This is by far my most complicated plugin, and has
> undergone rigorous testing. It allows you to schedule updates to the hard
> due dates for circulation rules, and update the due dates for items checked
> out that those rules apply to. This was written for a university where they
> change the due dates on checkouts near the end of each semester.

I have stronger reservations about this one -- not about the
functionality it implements, but that it exists as a plugin.
Adjusting due dates at the end of a semester strikes me as something
that a number of academic libraries might want; I hope this get
submitted for consideration as a core feature.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell:   +1 404-984-4366
skype:  gmcharlt
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Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org &
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