Customizing the Display of the Date Published Column With Serials

by Kelly McElligott on Jan 25, 2024

A new enhancement within Koha will allow libraries to customize the text of what is displayed within the Date Published (text) Column in the Serials Module. This is from the Koha Bug, 33039, libraries will be able to display serial subscription information, planned and published dates, notes, routing list information, and more.

Publication Date Template

Within the Serials Planning page, a new option is available to librares called the Publication Date template. This will allow libraries to enter specific subscription information, formatted in Template Toolkit, to display that desired information in the Published Date (text) column.

Steps:

1) When creating or editing a new subscription, within the Serials Planning page, a new field with a text box will appear.

2) The Publication Date Template area will allow libraries to display specific subscription fields with the date published (text) column in the subscription. This will require the use of the Template Toolkit. Any of these fields can be added:

Serial seq.: [% serialseq %]

Serial seq. X:[% serialseq_x %]

Serial seq. Y:[% serialseq_y %]

Serial seq. Z:[% serialseq_z %]

Subscription ID:[% subscriptionid %]

Biblionumber: [% biblionumber %]

Status: [% status %]

Planned date: [% planneddate | $KohaDates %]

Published date: [% publisheddate | $KohaDates %]

** Notes: [% notes %]

Routing notes: [% routingnotes %]

** This refers to public notes within the subscription.

3) This publication date template can be used on any subscription. With each subscription, this template box will need to be filled out for the values to display.

4) When you generate the next serial, the values from the template will appear.

NOTE: Since Koha has already predicted the next issue, that ‘expected’ issue will not display this new information, it will only display when the next issue is generated.

Example of Using Serial Sequence

Entering this into the 'Publication Date Template':

[% USE KohaDates %]

Serial seq.: [% serialseq %]

Example of Using Published Date

Entering this into the Publication Date Template:

[% USE KohaDates %]

Published date: [% publisheddate | $KohaDates %]

Altering the Month/Year Display

Another example for libraries would be displaying the month and year in the date published column:

Entering this into the 'publication date template' to display the published date as a Month and Year:

[% USE date %]
[% SET date_split = publisheddate.split('-') %]
[% month_text = date.calc.Month_to_Text(date_split.1) %]
[% month_text %] [% date_split.0 %]

This will display your published date as a Month/Year as opposed to a YYYY-MM-DD.

This is a nice clean look to display the published date. Below is an image of a few examples outlined in this blog post displayed from the staff interface from the record page:

Note:

We are using this piece of template toolkit:

[% USE KohaDates %]

in addition to the data elements. This part within the template toolkit will display the date in a format different than the default format. The default format looks like this:

Serials Module

For more resources for the Koha Serials Module:

See the Koha Manual- Serials

and the ByWater:

Self-Paced Learning in Koha: Serials