Koha Community Newsletter: May 2017

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May 2017

Volume 8, Issue 5
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Chad Roseburg, Koha Community Newsletter Editor

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Table of Contents

Development

Koha 17.05.00 Released

by Kyle Hall
Hello all!

It is my honor to announce the release of Koha 17.05.00!

Thanks you to everyone who contributed time and effort making this the best version of Koha yet!

The release notes can be found on the Koha Community website: https://koha-community.org/koha-17-05-released/

Koha 16.11.08 Released

by Katrin Fischer
The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 16.11.08.

Koha 16.11.08 is a bugfix/maintenance release.

It includes 5 enhancements, 50 bugfixes.

The full release notes are available at
Koha 16.11.08 Release Notes

Koha 16.05.13 Released

by Mason James
The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 16.05.13.

Koha 16.05.13 is a bugfix/maintenance release.

It includes 1 new features, 4 enhancements, 36 bugfixes.

The full release notes are available at
Koha 16.05.13 Release Notes

Koha 3.22.21 Released

by Julian Maurice
The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.22.21.

It is a bugfix/maintenance release and it includes 1 new feature, 1 enhancement and 31 bugfixes.

See the full release notes here:
Koha 3.22.21 Release Notes

What’s on in koha-devel #13

by Jonathan Druart

From Koha Development list

Hello librarians and developers,

I have a lot of things to tell you 🙂

First, Koha 17.05 is out! I would like to congratulate Kyle and all the release team!

It includes 7 new features and many enhancements and bug fixes.
You can find the release notes on the website : https://koha-community.org/koha-17-05-released/
I would like to highlight a feature that I am talking about for months now,
Hea version 2

= Hea v2 =
The development is now in the last version of 3.22.x and has been backported to all supported releases. So if you are using 3.22, 16.05 or 16.11 you should upgrade to (at least) 3.22.21, 16.05.13 or 16.11.08 and share with us information about your libraries!
See the global map to see all libraries https://hea.koha-community.org/libraries-on-a-map (just a few at the moment, we are waiting for you!)

See an example of the detail of a Koha installation with several libraries: https://hea.koha-community.org/libraries/425
You can tune and choose the information to share with the community on a new administration page. You can find it under “Administration › Usage statistics”. I really hope to see a whole map full of libraries in the next weeks 🙂

= 17.11 development has started =
17.05 is out, that means the next development cycle has just started. I have been elected to take the lead as Release Manager for this one.
I announced in my RM proposal ( https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Proposal_for_RM_17.11_joubu ) that I wanted to integrate more people in the team. To this end, I needed to know 1) who is willing to dedicate time for the next 6 months, 2) what are the needs of everybody and 3) coordinate and assign tasks to ease and speed the integration of patches. As I am not a politician I will try and do what I said. You may have noticed that I already started, here are the different actions that have already been triggered:

== Contact people ==
I have sent an email to 1) the support companies, 2) the contributors and
3) the general list ( https://lists.katipo.co.nz/pipermail/koha/2017-May/048066.html ) to ask them/you filling a form ( https://framaforms.org/ready-to-help-the-koha-community-1493918217), to collect ideas/needs on what we could work on the next release and who is going to help. I have received 40 answers so far, for a total of 62 persons and 852h per months. 29 support companies, 6 libraries and 5 volunteers. That’s a good start, but quite a lot of (active) support companies did not answer yet. If you are not an employee of a support company, you can still fill the form!

== A new tool – kanban ==
To coordinate and assign tasks I suggest a new tool that is quite easy to
use: a kanban. You can find it at https://tree.taiga.io/project/joubu-koha-rm-1711/kanban
There is a wiki page to explain a bit how it works: https://tree.taiga.io/project/joubu-koha-rm-1711/wiki/home
It will be a very important tool for the next release, so if you are involved directly or indirectly in the Koha community (translation, documentation, write or test patches, etc.) you should join us if it is not done yet. For instance we are currently reworking our entry points on the wiki to welcome new contributors, there is a task on the kanban subdivided in several tasks: https://tree.taiga.io/project/joubu-koha-rm-1711/us/21

== Welcoming new contributors, a priority ==
As I just said previously we are focussing on welcoming new contributors, if you are new and willing to help us it’s certainly the best moment to do
it. You should just wait a bit to let us rebuilt our wiki and give you the desire to help!

If you always wanted to dive into the Koha code, we are writing a tutorial to help and guide you throughout the different steps of a patch: write a
patch, attach it to the bug tracker, sign it off, etc. It is called koha-howto and you can find more information about it on the
kanban. The official announcement should arrive soon.

= Collaborative what’s on =
Heh yeah, I am sure some of you are sick of my English grammar and my obsession for the wiki syntax in my emails 🙂
Since I guess other developers would like to share what they did over the previous month I have created a pad ( https://annuel2.framapad.org/p/What_s_on_in_koha-devel) where everybody can contribute to the next “what’s on in koha-devel” email. Feel free to add stuffs to this page when you want to highlight something.

= Push refactoring patches soon =
I have a lot of refactoring patches that are in the queue for too long. I really would like to see a collective effort done on them.
They will lead to cleaner and more flexible and maintainable code. We have seen lot of bug recently that would have been avoided with them.
See the kanban and filter on the “Refactoring” Epic to see what must be done quickly.

Do not forget the IRC meetings!
If you want to tell us something or highlight a problem, start a discussion, it is the place to do it (do not forget to add the topic on the
agenda!)

The next general IRC meeting is on June 7th at 13 UTC.
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/General_IRC_meeting_7_June_2017

The next dev IRC meeting is on June 14 at 21 UTC
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Development_IRC_meeting_14_June_2017

Thanks and another project

by Alex Buckley
Thanks to the following people/organisations for helping contribute to the onboarding tool project, making the installation of Koha easier (bug 17855 – New onboarding tool feature to guide users through setting up Koha, and minor web installer UI improvements):

Catalyst IT
Catalyst Koha team
Marc Veron
Jonathan Druart
Marc Tompsett
Katrin Fischer
Owen Leonard

I am planning to build two major, new enhancements for Koha for a project assignment for my tertiary course with development work starting in July, and I hope to have them finished for the Koha 17.11 release in late November.
These two features are:

* Koha feature release change tool (which will be really useful for Koha system administrator’s because it will be displayed after each Koha update and it will display new sysprefs for review and modification, and links to the release notes and Koha manual so Koha system administrators will actually know what is in the new release). The RFC for this is:
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_feature_release_change_tool_RFC

* OPAC recommendation system (this will display recommended items to patrons using content based filtering algorithms. These algorithms will identify other items to recommend based on if they have similar characteristics to the item that a patron is viewing in the OPAC).
The RFC for this is:
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Recommendation_engine_integrated_with_Mana_project_RFC

I realise that Arthur Suzuki is also working on a recommendation system and I have got in contact with him, however I am building a recommendation system using a different structure therefore not building upon his work to date.

Please do give me feedback on what you think and any improvements based on the RFC’s

Community

New Koha Libraries

How To

Karen Holt walks you through charging a replacement fee for damaged items and discusses hard due dates in Koha.
Kelly McElligott takes a close look at setting up purchase suggestions as well as serial subscriptions in Koha.
Jessie Zairo has a tutorial for you on refunding lost item fees on return by branch.

Vimal Kumar created the following how to posts this month:

L2C2 Technologies has two how to articles for you:

Upcoming Events

Symposium Koha at Roubaix in France

Symposium Koha at Roubaix in France from the 26th June to 29th June. Two days of presentations and workshops the last day : translation; testing patchs.
To find out more, visit the french association KohaLa website : http://koha-fr.org/content/symposium-2017

Kohacon 2017 update

by Manny Tamayo

From Koha mailing list

Dear Koha Community,

Only 20 days to go before our Koha Conference will be held in Makati,
Philippines.

This is to update you on what’s going on in the Philippines. Most of you have read and heard news about the terrorist attack in Marawi City, Iligan which is part of Mindanao, a southern island of the Philippines.

Our venue in Makati City, the central business district of the Philippines
is 1,495.6 km away from Marawi. Our government is doing its best to control the situation there and assures the public safety throughout the nation. Also, since our venue is in the business district additional security are more visible from the city government and the venue itself has its own security personnel. The organizers are cooperating with the local authorities to make sure the safety of all KohaCon participants.

You can read this article from CNN for the update
http://cnnphilippines.com/news/2017/05/29/AFP-Marawi-control-clearing-ops.html.

June General IRC Meeting

The June General IRC meeting will be held on the 7th at 13:00 UTC.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

June Development IRC Meeting

The June Development IRC meeting will be held on the 14th at 21:00 UTC.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

Past Events

Presentation: “Getting the Champagne out of the Bottle: Modifying Koha for use as a Local Authors Catalog”

Fred King, Medical Librarian, MedStar Washington Hospital, Washington, DC, presented “Getting the Champagne out of the Bottle: Modifying Koha for use as a Local Authors Catalog” on May 30th at the annual meeting of the Medical Library Association, in Seattle, WA.

May General IRC Meeting

The May general IRC meeting was held on the 3rd at 20:00 UTC.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

May Special IRC Meeting

A special IRC meeting was held on May 10th at 13:00 UTC.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

May 10 Development IRC Meeting

The May 10 development IRC meeting was held at 13:00 UTC.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

May 24th Development IRC Meeting

The May 24th development IRC meeting was held at 14:00 UTC.

The agenda, links to the minutes, and other information is here.

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