Location and map: The Melbourne Atheneaum Library 

Moyra McAllister emailed the Koha e-list with the following invitation: "I am a Koha user based in Melbourne, and I know of a few others. At the recent VALA conference held here it was suggested that we form a user group to meet a few times a year to exchange tips and ideas and provide support for newbies. If there is anyone on the list who is interested in this idea could you contact me (off list please). Moyra E-mail: moyrab@internode.on.net"

Moyra is a senior librarian who has many years experience installing and using Koha in several library contexts. We congratulate Moyra on her initiative.  At CALYX, we have wanted to see Koha user groups established in major Australian cities, but preferred to see this done by librarians, not by a support company.  So we are thrilled that that is now occurring with Melbourne the first city to host the 1st Koha user group meeting in Australia. We hope that librarians in other cities will create their own Koha user group too. Moyra also said “As a number of you work in other states, it has been suggested that we could perhaps use Skype for teleconferencing. “ We don't know if this will be possible at this first meeting.

Have you ever noticed in the Koha Release Notes, Maori proverbs like this one? "Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini" It means, 'Success is not the work of one, but the work of many.' The Koha project gains its strength from the community of librarians and support companies.  The Maori word 'Koha' means 'gift': in Maori culture, it is a gift given with some expectation of reciprocity.  Participating in a user group and sharing your experience with others is a great way to give back to the community.

Best wishes, Irma 

Further to my enquiry the skipper said this: “You can fish for mackerel, then for cod and pollok, probably best if there are only 8 or 9 fishing at one time for mackerel as we can get a bit tied up when we hit a shoal! You can bring your own food and drink and we can also take you round the Bass Rock as well to see the amazing gannets and perhaps some seals.”

http://www.charterboats-uk.co.uk/braveheart-northberwick/

Payment and further details will be sorted out when enough people registered.

UPDATE: Please register before 30th April at the latest so arrangements can be made.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

• Release Manager : Paul Poulain, France
• Translation Manager: Shared between Samuel Desseaux and Frédéric Demians both from France
• Translation Assistants: Katrin Fischer, Germany; Marijana Glavica, Croatia
• Documentation Manager: Nicole Engard, USA
• DB Documentation Manager: Nicole Engard, USA
• Quality Assurance (QA) Manager: Ian Walls, USA
• Quality Assurance (QA) Assistants: Marcel de Rooy, Netherlands; Jonathan Druart, France; Mason James, New Zealand
• Release Maintainer 3.8.x: Chris Cormack, New Zealand
• Release Maintainer 3.6.x: Jared Camins-Esakov, USA
• Packaging Manager: Robin Sheat, New Zealand
• Packaging Assistant: Mason James, New Zealand
• Bug Wrangler: Magnus Enger, Norway; Katrin Fischer, Germany; Dobrica Pavlinušić, Croatia; Koustubha Kale, India
• Meeting Chair: BWS Johnson, USA

So that’s 17 people in total who have volunteered and been accepted to positions for the next 6 months (starting after the release of 3.8.0 on April 23). I think it is also great we have a nice geographic spread especially the bug wrangler team.

A lot of great great great work has been made, I’ll try to report things we made:
As we planned, we splitted in 5 groups, 4 of them focusing on specific hackers topics, the 5th one being librarians testing & translating.

Plack group

(Alex, Matthias, Dobrika and Henri-Damien at the beginning)
this group focused on introducing plack on Koha. A big performance boost was expected from their work.

• Alex, Matthias and Dobrika worked on “plackifying” Koha. The OPAC is already working fine under plack (it’s lived in Lyon3 university, running 3.6, since 3 months)
  A wiki page has been written to show how to integrate plack into Koha setup: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Plack
• The main problem that has been encountered with the staff interface is described in section 3 of this page: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Plack#Running_Intranet
  Dobrika worked a lot on writing patches to solve those problems (see bug 7172). He plans to run Koha on plack in production on staff interface next week, so that will be easier to identify any remaining problem !
• The major goal is to be Plack available as an option for Koha 3.8.

Just a comparison (patron search taken as example): generating a page in CGI mode takes 1.12s, and in Plack mode, it takes 0.334s (3 times faster. Yes you’re reading well. Koha is 3 times faster with Plack !)

A second comparison : zebra search: 1.6s for plack and 3s for CGI

A better use of Plack can even be made, and everybody plan to continue the work for 3.10
Just beware that you’re trading speed for memory: plack consumes more memory than CGI: each child running consumes around 60MB of memory, so if you’ve 12 childs (suggested/recommended value), it mean you need aroung 1GB for Plack.

Alex also tried to see how Koha could be fully PSGI compliant, but the tries were not successfull for now.

Ergonomy

(Owen, Katrin, Adrien, Gaetan, Marijana and Julian)

• The group made big lists of things that are inconsistent, ergonomy guidelines,… Some wiki pages have been written.
• the group suggested to use “Add” when we add something to an existing object, and the term “New” when it’s something not related to anything else
• Adrien added header search bar, that is everywhere else on Koha has been introduced in the mainpage (patch submitted)
• Gaetan started to work on a design for the home page, and the staff interface. The goal is to have it for 3.8
• Katrin added id to all pages, as well as a specific css class. It mean we will be able to write a css with different colors for each module (the patch has been pushed, see bug 7760, comment 32 for an example how to use it). The bug 7812 is also related to this improvement, and is about adding a global “header” that include the menu, the header search bar and the breadcrumb, but no code has been submitted yet.
• Owen presented a framework (bootstrap) that could be a replacement for YUI. The interesting point with bootstrap is that it contains all what we need for smartphones. Julian hacked a little bit, and replaced the opac-search.pl.

Database

(Marc, Stéphane and Christophe)

• the group focused on removing mysql-ism
• a first list of mysql-ism has been identified and put on the wiki: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/PostgreSQL.
• the “show column” mysqlism has been removed in a patch submitted on bug
• a generic OO approach has been taken for things that don’t have a generic equivalent.

Solr

(Zeno, Juan, Claire, Jonathan (a little) and Henri-Damien)
The Solr work is a long term work.
All the work the group made is explained in the wiki page : http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Switch_to_Solr_RFC#.23kohahack12

Librarians

The group of french librarians did a great work !

Bugzilla show the following numbers : no patches need to be pushed, 16 patches are waiting for QA, 71 patches are waiting for signoff.

The number of patches needing signoff hasn’t been lowered at first glance. But it’s a wrong feeling ! If you look closer, you’ll discover that :

• 3 patches only had no activity since january
• 6 patches only had no activity since february
• 13 patches haven’t been updated this week but earlier in march.

all other patches still to sign-off had an activity this week.
Around 30 patches have been signed-off.

Those librarians where french, so the french translation of Koha 3.8 have been done, and a large part of the manual has been translated as well.

Conclusion

Last year, everybody was happy of our hackfest. This year, everybody is happy with this hackfest. So next year we will organize another one, you can already ask your boss (for end of march)

The package can be retrieved from:

http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.06.04.tar.gz

You can use the following checksum and signature files to verify the download:

http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.06.04.tar.gz.MD5
http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.06.04.tar.gz.MD5.asc
http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.06.04.tar.gz.sig

Release notes for 3.6.4 are below the fold.

Come and get it!

RELEASE NOTES FOR KOHA 3.6.4
22 Feb 2012
========================================================================

Koha is the first free and open source software library automation package
(ILS). Development is sponsored by libraries of varying types and sizes,
volunteers, and support companies from around the world.
The website for the Koha project is 

http://koha-community.org/

Koha 3.6.4 can be downloaded from:

http://download.koha-community.org/koha-3.06.04.tar.gz

Installation instructions can be found at:

http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Installation_Documentation

    OR in the INSTALL files that come in the tarball

Koha 3.6.4 is a bugfix/maintenance release.

Highlights of 3.6.4
======================

6488	critical	opachiddenitems not working in master
6634	critical	manager_id not populated when paying fines
6984	critical	Holds Statistics Doesn't Work
7018	critical	need all acq permissions to search
7339	critical	Help System in IE8-9 Does Not Load With 500 Error
7359	critical	Begin migration to a new "Koha" namespace from the old "C4" namespace
7432	critical	Changing frameworks should refresh cache
7450	critical	Missing placeholders in admin/authorised_values.pl
7551	critical	Any logged-in OPAC user can renew items for others using a properly constructed URL
2012	major		Add bilio crashes under no zebra
3264	major		Uncloning a dropdown list in MARC authorities/biblio editor may clear all subfields (see comment 17)
5327	major		Unit tests required for all C4 modules
6115	major		Acquisition reports : date filter & sorting don't work
6490	major		Lost and paid not updated when book is checked out without check-in
6631	major		Unrestricted creation of lists by anonymous users
6718	major		No manager_id saved for writeoff of fines
6842	major		Branch transfer limits broken
7005	major		no confirmation for write off all
7431	major		OPAC item hold list doesn't show 'checked out'
7459	major		Can only add to one public list in OPAC search results

Bugs fixed in 3.6.4
======================

5473	normal		952 fields should be filled in by Acquisitions
6598	normal		OPACFineNoRenewals syspreference does not stop user renewing in opac
6694	normal		Anonymous sessions not kept when casAuthentication is on
7114	normal		Hiding filters on funds page messes with layout
7127	normal		Templates must be valid XHTML
7190	normal		written off fines being refunded
7350	normal		In New order the "+" button duplicates input text but not the "selected" in ddl
7402	normal		invoice not showing received titles
7406	normal		saved reports not showing right number
7409	normal		Missing dependencies for Debian package
7457	normal		basket.pl makes a lot of noise in the logs
7466	normal		Cart notification popup should appear onscreen even when button is offscreen
7472	normal		Edit button ineffective when paying borrower fee
7476	normal		Files executable that probably should not be
7489	normal		Implement DisplayOPACiconsXSLT for NORMARC XSLT
7501	normal		OPAC authority browser should mark alternate rows as highlighted
7521	normal		Cannot receive serials without full serials permissions
4376	enhancement	A minor change in the “GetMarcAuthors”  function of C4/Biblio.pm would allow differentiate the type of authors in the templates
5346	enhancement	Linking suggestions & orders
6210	enhancement	Choose framework on Merge
6299	enhancement	Provide a list of authorized values for relator terms
6314	enhancement	UNIMARC OPAC XSL improvements
6323	enhancement	Attach/move items - adding option "try again" after success or wrong barcode
6752	enhancement	Be stricter with utf-8 output
6790	enhancement	C4::Serials::getroutinglist returns unnecessary variable
6838	enhancement	Filtering and pagination in subscriptions table
6865	enhancement	Replace image-based gradient backgrounds with CSS3 gradients
6913	enhancement	Improving koha-list and koha-create
6985	enhancement	Hide "kw,wrdl:" from Search Results
7080	enhancement	Clean up interface on fine payment screens
7083	enhancement	Show creator name on list of public lists
7090	enhancement	Add "AllowItemsOnHandCheckout" syspref to allow issue to the patron regardless of hold status
7148	enhancement	Add some error handling to Acquisitions' Z39.50 search to match Cataloging's
7157	enhancement	Improve the j2a.pl cronjob
7201	enhancement	Hold to pull report needs extra fields
7246	enhancement	rebuild_zebra.pl --limit option to allow partial re-indexing
7289	enhancement	edition statement field
7343	enhancement	search tag usability in MARC framework
7345	enhancement	Should be possible to export MARC records without private fields
7355	enhancement	Note subfields are not displayed in TEXTAREA if hidden
7357	enhancement	Subscriptions titles are replaced by "---" when duplicated
7458	enhancement	New call number allocation plugin
7511	enhancement	Caching Templates
7514	enhancement	Choose OPAC language with URL parameter
7532	enhancement	opac-ics depends on Date::ICal which is largely unmaintained

System requirements
======================

    Changes since 3.4:

    * Perl 5.10 is required

Documentation
======================

As of Koha 3.2, the Koha manual is now maintained in DocBook.  The
home page for Koha documentation is 

http://koha-community.org/documentation/

As of the date of these release notes, only the English version of the
Koha manual is available:

http://manual.koha-community.org/3.6/en/

The Git repository for the Koha manual can be found at

http://git.koha-community.org/gitweb/?p=kohadocs.git;a=summary

Translations
======================

Complete or near-complete translations of the OPAC and staff
interface are available in this release for the following languages:

  * Chinese (Taiwan)
  * Danish
  * English (USA)
  * English (UK)
  * French (France)
  * German
  * Italian
  * Portuguese (Brazil)
  * Spanish

Partial translations are available for various other languages.

The Koha team welcomes additional translations; please see

http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Translating_Koha

for information about translating Koha, and join the koha-translate
list to volunteer:

http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-translate

The most up-to-date translations can be found at:

http://translate.koha-community.org/

Release Team
======================

The release team for Koha 3.6 is

Release Manager:        Chris Cormack <chrisc@catalyst.net.nz>
Documentation Manager:  Nicole C Engard <nengard@gmail.com>
Translation Manager:    Frédéric Demians <frederic@tamil.fr>
QA Manager:             Ian Walls <ian.walls@bywatersolutions.com>
Bug Wranglers:          MJ Ray, Marcel de Rooy, Paul Poulain, Mason James

Release Maintainer (3.4.x):
                        Chris Nighswonger <cnighswonger@foundations.edu>
Release Maintainer (3.6.x):
                        Chris Nighswonger <cnighswonger@foundations.edu>

Credits
======================

We thank the following libraries who are known to have sponsored
new features in Koha 3.6:
  * Los Gatos Public Library
  * NEKLS
  * East Brunswick Public Library
  * Athens County Public Libraries
  * Horowhenua Library Trust
  * Halton Borough Council
  * South Taranaki District Council

We thank the following individuals who contributed patches to
Koha 3.6.4. 

     3	Tomas Cohen Arazi
     1	Alex Arnaud
     2	D Ruth Bavousett
     3	Jared Camins-Esakov
     2	Colin Campbell
     7	Garry Collum
    11	Chris Cormack
     1	Christophe Croullebois
     1	Stéphane Delaune
     8	Frédéric Demians
     1	Connor Dewar
     1	Jonathan Druart
     1	Nicole Engard
     1	Magnus Enger
     4	Katrin Fischer
     2	Kyle M Hall
     2	Kate Henderson
     7	Srdjan Jankovic
     1	Bart Jorgensen
     1	Janusz Kaczmarek
     1	Jorgia Kelsey
     1	Henri-Damien Laurent
    13	Owen Leonard
     1	Peter Lorimer
     5	Julian Maurice
     1	Matthias Meusburger
     2	Jono Mingard
    31	Chris Nighswonger
     2	Maxime Pelletier
    26	Paul Poulain
     1	MJ Ray
     7	Liz Rea
     5	Marcel de Rooy
     5	Sam Sanders
     3	Adrien Saurat
     6	Robin Sheat
     1	Juan Sieira
     1	Duncan Tyler
     2	Aleksa Vujicic
     1	biblibre

We regret any omissions.  If a contributor has been inadvertantly missed,
please send a patch against these release notes to
koha-patches@lists.koha-community.org.

Revision control notes
======================

The Koha project uses Git for version control.  The current development
version of Koha can be retrieved by checking out the master branch of 

    git://git.koha-community.org/koha.git

The branch for Koha 3.6.x (i.e., this version of Koha and future bugfix
releases) is 3.6.x.

The next major feature release of Koha will be Koha 3.8.0.

Bugs and feature requests
======================

Bug reports and feature requests can be filed at the Koha bug
tracker at

http://bugs.koha-community.org/

Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini 

##### Autogenerated release notes updated last on 22 Feb 2012 20:14:40 Z #####

So let’s go with last month news…

Just one number to begin with: more than 200 patches have been pushed in february. Good job everyone !

Bugzilla news

There are 74 bugs that are waiting for a sign-off. That’s only a few less than last month, but many have been signed, and many have been added.
I see that 12 of them have been submitted in january or before. Maybe we should discuss of setting a very high priority to those “old” patches.
Also note that I have submitted a new script that is able to check all patches that “need signoff”, and check if they still apply. You can find this script on bug http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=7553

The very good news is that the pile of bugs that have been signed-off and are waiting for QA is now very small: there are only 14, and the oldest one is less than one week old ! Thanks to the hard work of Marcel that helped me a lot QAing.

Important new features

Template Toolkit caching (technical)

The bug 7511 add a new feature : templates (the layout of Koha pages) can now be cached. It means they are pre-built and can be retrieved very quickly. It results in an overall improvement of speed of 10%, just with 4 lines of code !

general caching

After a discussion on the mailing list, we made some changes on the general caching: the reference to memcached is now made in Apache configuration, this let us cache koha configuration file itself, this result in a 10% speed gain once again.
You can find the discussion at: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Cache_handling_in_Koha
All patches have been applied on koha code, will be available for Koha 3.8. It means that existing setups using memcached will have to be updated when upgrading to 3.8

Test suite improved

Catalyst NZ has organised, in january, an “OpenSource Academy”. Some of the students choose to work on Koha test suite, and 5 new contributors have been added during this Academy. They have added some tests to our test suite. Congrats to all of them (and thanks to Catalyst ppl that trained them !)

Code cleaning

The effort for cleaning code continued:

• Owen has written a patch that standardize how we call the book vendor (in the code, not in the interface). It used to be sometimes supplierid, sometimes booksellerid, sometimes id. Now it’s always booksellerid.
• De nesting effort: All access to database are made through Perl packages that are located in C4 directory. the problem is that circulation needs patrons, that needs catalogue that needs circulation. At the end, almost all packages are loaded for almost all scripts. There is a de-nesting effort i’ve started on bug 6875, that could be continued, but the first patches have been pushed onto Koha. It’s a long term effort, but it’s worth the price, as it also improve speed.
• Capitalizing strings: The bug 2780 is back: we had decided a long time ago, to use capital letters only on 1st word. For example, adding an item button should not be spelled “Add Item” but “Add item”. This may sound a minor thing, but it’s a consistency things, and it’s very important for translators. If we have “Add Item” and “Add item” and “add item”, translation must be written 3 times ! There’s now a strong QA rule for this, and you’re welcomed to submit patches fixing remaining strings with useless capital letter !

funny and not that small new features

• The patron password is now entered as hidden *****
• you can run rebuild_zebra.pl with an offset and a length, to quickly test or reindex a small chunk of your database (bug 7246)
• we can now search patrons on their name, but also on their phone or email (bug 7544)
• you can now add and remove a biblio to the cart from the biblio itself, not only add it (bug 3215)
• you can print transfer slips for transfers without hold (bug 7467)

bugs “in discussion”

The first discussions took place for bugs/patches/enhancement that require a community decisions.
I’ve added on bugzilla a “in discussion” query, if you use it now, you’ll see that there are 13 bugs set “in discussion”. Feel free to start the discussion, by adding a page to the wiki and starting a thread on koha-devel.

Coding Guidelines

For those who don’t know, the coding guidelines describe the rules for coding, that are used for Quality Assurance. For example, we have decided to use 4 spaces to indent the code and have it more readable.
So the following code is OK:
if ($RMnewletter eq '4') {
    say "end of february";
}
while this one is not:
if ($RMnewletter eq '4') {
  say "end of february";
}
(yes, it’s a detail, but when you have 100 000+ lines, it’s the kind of detail that is important !)

Many things where already made, but not written, now they are. The more things will be written, the easiest it will be to do the QA !

I’ve added code & number to the guidelines. That will be usefull when QAing, to point a breaking of a guideline. For example [PERL2] rule says “All scripts and modules should enable the strict and warnings pragmas”. If the QA team says “PERL2 rule broken failed QA”, you know what it refers to.

If you want to look at all those guidelines, it’s on the wiki: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Coding_Guidelines

sandboxes and patch workflow

The sandbox system is done & has been deployed on 10 BibLibre servers. Head to http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Sandboxes
What are those sandboxes done for ? That’s a handy way for non developpers to test and validate patches.
The community workflow is the following:
1 someone report a problem or announce an enhancement
2 someone submit a patch to fix the problem or add the enhancement
3 someone test and validate the fix or the enhancement
4 someone (from the QA team) validate that the code respect the coding guidelines
5 the release manager “push” the patch into official Koha.
(this workflow is also described here: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Bug-enhancement-patch_Workflow)

The step 3 (test & validate) is also called “signing off”, and can be done by anyone. The best being when it’s a librarian !
However, it can be tricky to have a working koha, and apply the patch. The sandbox system hope to fix this point, by letting anyone with no technical skill test a patch !

Don’t hesitate to use it, ask for more information if you want. you can catch me on IRC

Note that the code of this sandbox system will be published soon at http://git.koha-community.org/gitweb/?p=contrib/global.git;a=summary

The response advised that they are considering organisations as possible candidates to hold the NZ trademark and we were welcome to submit a proposal which would be required to address a number of criteria set by PTFS.

Te Horowhenua Trust, trading as Horowhenua Library Trust, is the nonprofit body elected by the Koha global community to hold community assets in safe keeping. We have spent a number of years negotiating with PTFS and would prefer now to trust a transparent and defined process conducted through IPONZ as to the proper ownership of the mark in New Zealand.

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

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

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:

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 !!!

The Horowhenua Library Trust has been elected by the worldwide online Koha user community to be the custodian of Koha intellectual property including the KOHA name and associated logos in any form, font or stylisation, and whether alone or in combination with other words or marks, including [insert the Koha logo].

We at the Horowhenua Library Trust love it when people talk about Koha, build businesses around Koha and produce products that make life better for Koha users and developers. We do, however, have a trademark, which we are obliged to protect. The trademark gives us the exclusive right to use the term to promote websites, services, businesses and products. Although those rights are exclusively ours, we are happy to give people permission to use the term under most circumstances.

The following is a general policy that tells you when you can lawfully refer to the KOHA name and associated logos without need of any specific permission from the Horowhenua Library Trust:

First, you must make clear that you are not Horowhenua Library Trust and that you do not represent [Horowhenua Library Trust] or the Koha user community. A simple disclaimer on your home page is an excellent way of doing that.

Second, you may use the KOHA name and logo only in descriptions of your website, product, business or service to provide accurate information to the public about yourself or your website, product, business or service.

If you would like to use the KOHA name or logo for any other use, please contact us and we’ll discuss a way to make that happen. We don’t have strong objections to people using the name for their websites and businesses, but we do need the chance to review such use.

This trade mark usage policy is intended to be legally binding.

Generally, we will approve your use if you agree to a few things, mainly:
(1) our rights to the KOHA trademark are valid and superior to yours and (2) you’ll take appropriate steps to make sure people don’t confuse you with us or your website, product, business or service with ours. In other words, a short conversation (usually done via email) should clear everything up in short order.
If you currently have a website that is using the KOHA name and you have not gotten permission from us, don’t panic. Let us know, and we’ll work it out, as described above.

We are being represented by Andrew Matangi from Buddle Findlay with input from Rochelle Furneaux and feel very confident that he has a good understanding of the Koha journey over the last decade or so and how we have got to where we are. He is also a specialist in this area so we have been quite relieved to have his hand on the tiller and plotting the course. These things take time and have to be done discretely of course, but a key date has passed and I think it is okay now to update everyone on progress.

A letter was sent to PTFS on the 19th January essentially outlining the grounds on which our objection to their NZ trademark application is based and asking them to assign their NZ trade mark application to the Trust. We also attached a Koha Trademark Usage Policy which the Library Trust recently adopted, following consultation with the Koha Subcommittee. We advised that unless a response was received by noon NZ time on the 1st of February we would file formal opposition.

Well that date has passed without word and so a formal Notice of Opposition is being prepared. The process from here is set out on the IPONZ website.

So there it is, due process being followed and no resolution in sight but we are still very confident that the right decision will be made.