Koha Community Newsletter: February 2017

Posted on Posted in Events, IRC Meetings, Koha, Koha Newsletter, Koha Tips & Tricks, release, releases, security Tagged with ,

Koha Community Newsletter Subscribe
February 2017

Volume 8, Issue 2
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Chad Roseburg, Koha Community Newsletter Editor

Please submit news items to Submit

Table of Contents

Development

Koha 16.11.04 Released

by Katrin Fischer
The Koha Community is proud to announce the release of Koha 16.11.04.

Koha 16.11.04 is a bugfix/maintenance release.

It includes 3 enhancements, 41 bugfixes.

read the full release notes

Koha 16.05.10 Released

by Mason James
The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 16.05.10.

Koha 16.5.10 is a bugfix/maintenance release.

It includes 1 enhancements, 32 bugfixes.

Read the full release notes

Koha 3.22.17 Released

by Julian Maurice
The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 3.22.17

It is a bugfix/maintenance release and it includes 23 bugfixes.

Read the full release notes

What’s on in koha-devel #10

by Jonathan Druart
[ Originally published on the Koha and Development mailing lists: read original ]
Hello librarians and developers,

Several interesting initiatives emerged in this beginning of year 2017. Lot of things need to ready for the next stable release in March. If you have some spare time, do not hesitate to get involve and make things you love moving forward 🙂

= Catalyst academy =
Let’s start with the yearly Catalyst academy week.

The Open Source Academy is a Catalyst initiative designed to provide training & work experience in open source development for young New Zealand technologists. We got signoffs and patches from 6 students (Zoe, Luke, Grace, Karen, Caitlin and Emma) and they all got at least 1 patch pushed into master this week [1]. Congrats to all of them! Looking forward the next one 🙂

= Move marcxml out of the biblioitems table (bug 17196) =
Well, that’s it, it’s in and will be in 17.05!

I’d like to specially thanks Mason, Josef, Zeno, Nick and Marcel to have been involved in the testing and QA process of this important change. It will offer us more flexibility in the future for new developments as well as bring us performance boost in few areas.

Since that change will break lot of reports, I have worked on a way to automatically detect the problematic reports and automagically convert it using the new columns. I think we really need it for the next major release, take a look at bug 17898 (Add a way to automatically convert SQL reports).

= Dashboard =
I have submitted a pull request which has been quickly merged (thanks Chris!). The dashboard (http://dashboard.koha-community.org) now displays a “Overall bug tracker health status” with the number of blocker, critical and major bug reports opened over the last 60 days. If you want to quickly know which are the hot patches waiting for you, just click on the link and you will get the bug list.

=Bootstrap 3=
The bootstrap library used for the staff interface has been upgraded to the version 3.3.7. Lot of work has been done by Josef and Owen to make the staff interface looking awesome. Elements like buttons, links, icons, modal windows have been homogenised. Some work are still in progress but the big step has been done. You can take a look at the depend patches of bug 17873 (Make all buttons Bootstrap styled) if you want easy signoffs.

= Hea – Share your statistics with the community =
Few days ago I have submitted patches for a proposition of what could be Hea version 2. If you want more informations, take a look at bug 18066 and especially the comment 2 about screenshots. Developers are very welcome to test, and librarians to give their opinion on what could be missing to make Hea better. I would also like to get help from a native English speaker to add more informations on the administration page to explain better what happens (and what will not happen!) when an option or another is set.

= Refactoring =
Lot of refactoring bug reports are waiting for testers and QAers. Everything has been stuck for the last month. I really would like to see more attention on these bugs, to continue the work in progress. To know how you can help, take a look at this graph: https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/showdependencygraph.cgi?id=15449
Zoom out, zoom out, once again. If you are a signoffer, pick the orange boxes, if you are a QAer, look at the yellow ones.

= Template Toolkit syntax for notices =
This is certainly one of the most important area if you want to help us getting this in for the next release. These are quite lot of things to do to get something ready. First we want to make sure we will not get regression using the TT syntax. To prove that, I have opened an omnibus (see bug 17961 and related bugs – TT syntax for notices – Prove we have an equivalent for our historical custom syntax). A huge amount of tests are provided to prepare the ground and safe our backs for later. It is, in my opinion, the important part of the work. All of these patches are easy to test.

To ease the migration for libraries, I have developed an interface to automagically convert the notices from the historical syntax to the TT syntax. You can take a look at bug 17981 and bug 18007 for this interface change. To test *all* of this stack change, you just need to checkout the remote branch from my github repository [2]

Screenshot of the convert interface: https://pageshot.net/pVRqSxln4A9cqjtM/pro.kohadev.vm

= Authority merge bugs =
Marcel is reworking the authority merge feature. It is quite buggy and the code is hard to maintain currently. You can take a look at bug 17908 (Authority merge omnibus) and all related bug reports to help and/or follow the progress.

The next general IRC meeting is on March 1st, 20 UTC.
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/General_IRC_meeting_1_March_2017

The next dev IRC meeting is today (!) at 20 UTC
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Development_IRC_meeting_8_February_2017

Hope to see your there!

Cheers,
Jonathan

[1] https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Catalyst_Academy
[2] https://github.com/joubu/Koha/tree/bug_17981

Summary: Koha Devel Meeting, 22 February 2017

by Nick Clemens
[ From Koha dev list ]

We had a productive dev meeting today, just wanted to highlight some of our discussions for the general list readers. If this seems useful I will try to send these updates after each dev meeting:

The Onboarding tool still needs more testing (see Jonathan’s email here: http://lists.koha-community.org/pipermail/koha-devel/2017-February/043481.html)

This tool will make it easier for those setting up a new instance to enable necessary settings and configuration and generally make Koha setup more friendly.

It was proposed as a possibility to roll the tool out in English first, and add other languages as they are tested. Ideally we would have as much testing as possible now. We will discuss and vote on how to move ahead at the next Developers meeting (8 March 2017, 19UTC)

The ru-RU and uk-UA languages were discussed for possible removal as there has been no maintenance, if you are using these or interested in helping maintain (or have strong opinion) please let us know.

Testing and QA teams can always use more help so let us know if you are interested.

Other interesting notes:
ElasticSearch dependencies are being packaged by Mirko
Jonathan continues work on refactoring and moving things to the Koha namespace (see here for Koha::Patron status)
OverDrive integration has been pushed to master

The next meeting will be 8 March 2017, 19UTC, I hope to see you there.

KohaDevBox Updates

by Tomas Cohen Arazi
Updates:
(a) Support for setting ElasticSearch 5.1
(b) Fixes for instance creation errors

Details:
(a) For supporting ElasticSearch 5.1 I’ve removed references to ‘2.x’ in the code (either for repository configuration or display messages). So you should now set in your vars/user.yml file either:
elasticsearch_version: ‘5.x’
elasticsearch_version: ‘2.x’
elasticsearch_version: ‘1.7’
for the desired ES version. (Note: the quotes are required)
ES 5.1 requires higher RAM availability so I made the Vagrantfile set 4GB of RAM when KOHA_ELASTICSEARCH=1 is set in ENV when doing the ‘vagrant up’ command. You can tweak the Vagrantfile locally to whatever you want (lower value?).

This has all been documented on the README.md file

This should be enough for being able to test https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=17255

If there’s something missing, please file a bug in https://github.com/digibib/kohadevbox/issues/new so we take care of it. As usual, pull requests are welcome.

(b) There have recently been some changes on the koha-* scripts so they don’t (only) have hardcoded paths, but accept a new entry in koha-conf.xml () which specifies the place to pick the source code from. Pretty cool!
But this made koha-gitify fail to set all it is needed to keep working as we did before.
As a workaround I’ve added a fixed {{ vagrant_home_dir }}/kohaclone entry to the koha-conf-site.xml.in file we ship with KohaDevBox.
Ideally, we should just add –dev-install and –dev-install-dir options to koha-create and just (probably) deprecate koha-gitify. I’m not sure what is the best solution. koha-gitify does lots of path fixes in places that are not related to koha-* scripts (zebra configuration files, koha-conf.xml itself, etc).

I’m raising this so we can discuss the best way to deal with this. Having a koha-gitify-like feature baked inside Koha is not a bad idea at all!

I’d like to highlight that I haven’t succeeded in figuring why installing Test::DBIx::Class fails randomly. I blamed CPAN mirrors at some point because the default one was returning ‘not found’ when fetching the sources. But that doesn’t seem to be the ONLY cause for failures. Any help on this is welcome. The way to check what’s going on is to comment out that step and log into the box and cpanm manually.

The most important on this regard: don’t feel bad when the box fails to load because of this stuff. Remember you can ‘continue’ the process by reprovisioning. It is important to keep in mind that you need to do it with the same params you chose for ‘vagrant up’. For example, I always do:

$ KOHA_ELASTICSEARCH=1 SKIP_WEBINSTALLER=1 CREATE_ADMIN_USER=1 vagrant up

so, if it fails to install something (temporary network issues? the weird Test::DBIx::Class random failure?) I always do:

$ KOHA_ELASTICSEARCH=1 SKIP_WEBINSTALLER=1 CREATE_ADMIN_USER=1 vagrant provision

No need to halt and reload the machine. I’m not sure why people are doing it, but don’t. Unless you have specific reasons to do so. It will eat a couple minutes from your time with no evident advantage.

Community

New Koha Libraries

Community Gossip

Call for KohaCon18 hosting proposals
Koha Earns Tops Marks in the 2016 Perceptions Survey.
Nathan Curulla writes a Valentine to Koha.
Barton Chittenden writes about sharing information in the Koha community.
Jessie Zairo talks about how you can support Koha-US using Amazon Smile.

How To

Kyle Hall goes over the new multi item holds feature in Koha 16.11 .
Articles by Barton Chittenden:

Articles by Jessie Zairo:

Articles by Kelly McElligott:

Articles by Vimal Kumar

Best Koha Implementation Award – 2017 (Koha Conclave)

by Amit Gupta
The 2nd National Koha Conclave concluded last week at TCS, Pune with the announcement of the Best Koha Implementation Award 2017. There were 11 libraries in India who sent their nominations which were reviewed by a Jury of 4 people including Mr. Chris Cormack who was the Chief Resource Person at the Conclave.

After a very diligent review by the Jury, the Best Koha Implementation Award was announced jointly to the Vikram Sarabhai Library , Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and Mysore University Library, Mysore. The award trophy was presented by Mr. Chris Cormack and Mr. N V Sathyanarayana to the representatives of the IIM Ahmedabad library at the conclave on the last day of the event. Since no representative from Mysore University Library was present, the trophy will be presented to the University Library during a separate function in the next couple of weeks.

Informatics and the Koha community congratulates both the IIM Ahmedabad Library and Mysore University Library for implementing Koha in the most innovative ways leading to its best utilization for the Library and its users.

We look forward to more nominations for the 2018 Best Koha Implementation Award.

Upcoming Events

Koha-US Conference CFP

by Christopher Davis
Koha-US is calling for proposals for conference talks/presentations, round
table discussions, poster sessions, etc. for its 2017 annual conference
held on August 9-12 in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA. The theme for this year’s
conference is “Koha: You Can Do It” and is in the enabling attitude of
Rosie the Riveter (see attached poster). We are seeking proposals for
diverse audiences, from new Koha users, to the most advanced Koha software
developers. Please check out the proposal submission form found at
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfoq_J7IHoTP-KhdGp3I-FYbi0L44BWMjTIgLZcCZ4XpugRuw/viewform
for more details.

If you are not sure what you could share at this conference, think about
the things you wish someone would have told you about when you were
struggling or maybe think of a lesson you “learned the hard way.” Maybe you
could share your experiences integrating Koha into a library program. The
Koha community loves to share and presenting at the conference is a great
way to do just that.

2017 Koha North California Summit

2017 Northern CA Koha Summit Event Date: April 5, 2017

  • Event Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm
  • Event Location: Martha Riley Community Library
  • Event Address: 1501 Pleasant Grove Boulevard, Roseville CA 95747
  • Registration: Fill out form

Find out more here.

Hackfest in Marseille 2017: registration now open

[ Registration now open. Announced on koha dev mailing list ]

Date: March. 20th-24th

Kohacon 2017 Update: Call for Papers

by Eugene Jose Espinoza

The Call for Papers is now open! During the initial pre-registration, the following collated topics were identified which piqued the interests of the pre-registrants:

Linked data
Library user’s needs
Adoption and migration of Koha in academic libraries
Koha mobile application
Patrons
Managing academic library with Koha
Integrating Technology in Education – Open Source Systems
Koha Experience in Public and Academic Libraries
Migration
Users’ Perception toward the Electronic Information Resources
Koha as CMS
Discovery Tool and Koha
Service Satisfaction by Koha
Koha enhancement
Koha configuration
EDS integration
Self-checkout system

We encourage pre-registered participants who answered they are inclined to present during the Conference to submit abstracts of their papers to the KohaCon2017 Organizing Committee.
The deadline for the submission of Title and Abstract is March 30, 2017.
Please send it to kohacon17@gmail.com or aslplibrarians@gmail.com

KohaCon17 will be on June 19-23, 2017 at Ayala Museum, Makati City.

We are happy to announce that you can now visit our website
http://kohacon2017philippines.com for information regarding KohaCon 2017.

Here are some reminders:

  • We would like to see you here, register online -link-
  • Be our sponsor, slots still available maging KOHAnep and
    KObaHAbagi -link-
  • Share your experiences, knowledge and expertise about Koha, call
    of papers is until March 15, 2017 -link-
  • We are thankful for our venue sponsors, Main Conference venue at
    Ayala Museum -link-

    and Hackfest venue at Asian Institute of Management -link-

March 8 Development IRC Meeting

The March Development IRC meeting will be held on the 8th at 19:00 UTC.

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

Past Events

March General IRC Meeting

The March general IRC meeting was held on the 1st at 20:00 UTC.

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

February 8 Development IRC Meeting

The February development IRC meeting was held on the 8th at 20:00 UTC.

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

February 22 Development IRC Meeting

The February development IRC meeting was held on the 22nd at 13:00 UTC.

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

About

Editor, Koha Community Newsletter