Koha Sponsoring Discussion

This is a late post, but I wanted to write down some information from the sponsorship talk that occurred on the last session of the Koha Con users conference(April 17, 2009).

There was a heated discussion in regards to the best way for the community to get better about informing each other what projects are being sponsored and how best to do resource sharing. It was agreed upon that the community would use the existing to Bugzilla (http://bugs.koha.org) to input enhancement work and sponsored development. Since Bugzilla doesn't include fields for all the information we'd like to see about sponsored development features it was suggested that there be a sort of template/example bug placed so that others could see all the information that needed to be included into the comments field.

Many people are hoping that with this method if someone doesn't have money to sponsor development or would like to help partially fund a development it will make it possible for others who are also interested in the idea the add feedback or even contribute.

I like this idea, however, ultimately I would like to see a better tool developed as it could have a very positive impact on the Koha community. If there were a way for vendors to bid on features directly from this tool and a way for libraries or individuals to contribute to the feature right from the browser, it would just make the entire process much easier and efficient. You would be able to have a meter or similar feature to say something like, "Only $200 left needed to sponsors this project". It will also make it easy for people to vote and make certain feature requests more of a higher priority without having to search through the thousands of bugs in bugzilla. This type of system could also have a method for people to say I have $1000 to offer for this project, who would be interested in developing it.

Does this type of service exist anywhere is there any type of open source tool similar? Could this be a website with support for many different projects to organize their development efforts?

Koha Dev Workflow Tips and Tricks

pieces "borrowered" from Nicole Engard blog post (thank you!)

Git
Chris - Git has a built in garbage collector $ git gc - if you run it after creating a branch and before checking it out, makes switch branches much faster (make a branch, run this and then checkout the branch).

Joe - has a script he makes on different servers that he uses to get his shell to where he wants it to be for testing, it sets his self created variables and standard values (http://blogs.liblime.com/developers/2009/04/19/simple-shell-trick/). Also he posted a good tip on the LibLime blog: http://blogs.liblime.com/developers/2009/04/10/simple-git-trick-for-bash/

Galen - One of the things that he does since he can’t claim to have the visual design skills that Owen does - he has become a real stickler about the HTML that is on the OPAC & Staff client - making it appear as XHTML. There are tools in Firefox that can make for a good development environment: Fire Bug, for validation the HTML validator plugin in excellent at doing it quickly without submitting your site to an online validator, Firefox accessibility plugin lets you run automated tests against your site to meet requirements for ADA, Also the web developer plugin, Yahoo! Dev tools are slow, but they provide valuable info. Something that is useful, but not a dev tool, is the Zotero plugin (citation manager) www.zotero.org — geared toward people to do lots of research online.

Unix
-screen command very useful! Look up example .screenrc files
-cluster ssh, ability to have multiple ssh sessions open and run all commands at same time http://sourceforge.net/projects/clusterssh/
-sshfs mount a remote file system
-nohup will run script in the background which is good for like doing a zebra rebuild in case your ssh session gets disconnected

grep for file and | to xargs

Status of Development for Koha 3.2

presented by Galen Charlton

Goals for Koha 3.2 (an ambitious release)

• New acquisitions module
• Holdings support
  
• Many circulation improvements - allowing to configure the circulation rules to the nth degree
  
• Improving stability

RFCs - A statement of saying we want this bit of functionality or we (programmer,library, vendor) are going to implement this function for the next version of Koha. Sometimes the RFCs are wouldn't it be nice.

Not all RFCs will be implemented for 3.2. Some were just proposals, and others didn't end up being sponsored.

New acquisitions module

• Developed by BibLibre
• In production with one of their customers
• Working on submitting their patches for 3.2
• Review and testing period

Holdings structure

• Developed by LibLime, sponsored by WALDO
  
• Introduces "summary" records to Koha
• Entering testing by WALDO
• You will be able to load them and export then and in theory you can pretend that the 852 tag doesn't exist.
  

WALDO circulation features

• Proxy patrons
• Fines thresholds
• Callslips, similar to request system
  
• Recalls, if someone has an item on loan and a faculty member has it the recall will say return it at once
  
• Hourly loans, meant to support having an item checked out for hours instead of days
  
• Email checkout slips
  

Other circulation features

• Calculate fines in days debarred, developed by BibLibre for 3.0 and will makes it way to 3.2 soon
• Placing hold on multiple items, introduced by Alloy Computing (yay HCL and Alloy Computing)
• Additional hold request improvements sponsored by NEKLS
• Course reserves

OPAC enhancements

• Support for enhanced content providers, Syndetics, LibraryThing, Babeltheque
• Tag multiple items (yay HCL and Alloy Computing)

Cataloging

• biblios.net marc record editor integration
• Improved browse indexes
• ISBN13 normalization (sponsored by PISD) - meaning if you only have 10 digit isbn it will compute isbn13 and visa versa
  
• Item bulk status change, BibLibre working on this and Liblime also working on a global change
• Brief records
• Record maintenance
• Deleted records - ability to still be able to search for deleted items and bibs in a specific context

Serials (for a non-library person like myself, what are Serials?)

• General improvements to serials display and predication pattern management
• More control over display of recently checked in issues (WALDO)

Administration

• Improved system preference editor (Jesse Weaver, developer at small library)

Reporting

• Improvements to the guided reports, mainly the ability to add placeholder mechanism. It will let you put in a parameter at the time of running the report instead of having to edit the SQL everytime.

Miscellaneous

• Granular permissions (new acquisitions module already implements some of these)
• Internet Explorer compatibility improvements (WALDO)
• Improvements to overdue report (PISD)
• Improved OAI-PMH server (Tamil)
• URL checker (Tamil)

Galen, "There will be at least one cool new thing coming from the KohaCon development meeting this weekend"

Timeline
Not something that is finalized. The currently goal for 3.2 will likely be late summer or early autumn. 3.1 release for testing in early summer.

The tip of the Koha bleeding edge is always and odd release number following the Linux kernel version numbering system.