Category: Koha

Well its only 3 more days until the second public library in NZ goes live
with Koha. And as you’d expect its pretty
busy at work at the moment. Once its all live, I’m sure there will be a
bunch of publicity so keep an eye out for that. Its looking pretty crash
hot, the designers and htmlers have done a great job I reckon.

UPDATE 2005/10/18: Too smooth

Well that was the smoothest go live Ive ever been involved in, I keep
feeling that something will explode, but into the second day of production
and everything seems all fine. We had a few glitches, but nothing close to a
show stopper, very gratifying.

Joshua and I talked the other day, and did some profiling on the circulation
scripts, and we noticed that Date::Manip was the main bottleneck. So Ive
made a copy of C4::Date and called it C4::Circulation::Date and rewrote it
to not use Date::Manip. This should win some speed increase.

Today I got the reviews displaying in the opac, it only shows the approved
ones. If there are reviews available a count of them will display on the
opac. If you click on the number you will see the actual reviews

Ive been working on reviews in Koha this weekend. So far you can make a new
review or edit one you have alredy made. Each review is marked not approved,
what I need to do now is make an interface to let the librarians mark one
approved, and then displaying it in the opac. You can see screenshots
of what I have so far.
Koha

Koha as always is going through a phase of optimisation. This time we are
seeking to optimise the searching. Currently the search works well, in that
its functionally correct and returns correct and complete results. The
complaint at the moment is that we are sure it can be faster.
And as programmers we wont be happy until we make it so 🙂
So tomorrow morning (nz time) we are meeting on irc to talk over some
options the main points ill be making are

• We have 2 audiences, the librarians and the public
• Most important, we return correct results, speed comes a close
  second
• The public do not care (for the most part) why/how the results are
  derived, just as long as they are right
• Innovative tools will win us a little fame

I cant stress the correct results enough, its very frustrating to search for
an item, see that its on the shelf then find it isnt.

After lots of thought and consultation with people (Thanks Olwen and Mason)
Ive managed to finally get some data out of a legacy library system in a
usable format. So to celebrate it, I had some utterly delicious venison
chorizo. So far they have jumped to the lead as the best sausages ive had.
Followed closely by the cheese Kransky’s I had the other day.

In the largest Koha irc meeting to date, Joshua was appointed the release
manager for the next stable branch of Koha.
Bugfixes and small feature improvements will continue on the 2.2 branch,
with 2.2.3 due to be released in a week or two.
You can read the full logs of the meeting here.
And view the todo list for 2.4 here. Lots of
interesting features and improvements planned.

As always we would love more volunteers to work on Koha, not just
programmers but documentation writers, designers, htmlers, translators, etc.
No offers of help turned down 🙂

Koha

Today I had a play making a circulation programme using Curses::UI. It was
pretty easy and I have a rudimentary programme that will know Issue and
Return.
Ive committed the code to CVS .. its by no means finished yet and I hope to
get time to keep working on it. Screenshots are here.

Koha

Install the HLT OPAC
Plugin

Install the NPL OPAC
Plugin

Koha

Talking with Joshua the other day got me thinking .. now circulation in the
web browser works fine for a low to medium volume. But when you start
returning/issuing a lot of books, the overhead of fetching the html, and the
browser rendering it becomes very apparent.
So I thought back to the original circulation, which was curses based, and
how fast that was, and decided to start on a TK implementation. Mostly just
as a proof of concept.
So at 10am Sunday morning I sat down to start, and its 12.29 now and I have
a system that will issue books for Koha. Lots to be done still .. but its
pretty simple so I think this might be a goer. Ive put up screenshots so
feel free to take a look.
Comments/Suggestions are more than welcome.
And now im going to play world of warcraft.

Koha