KohaCon12: New in Koha 3.8

by Nicole C. on Jun 4, 2012

Paul was up first talking about Koha 3.8. He highlighted for us the features he thought were most important.

First some numbers!

• 1087 changes were made to the source code! Some were small and some very large.
• 71 different contributors
• 26 organizations contributed (this uses the email domain – so it might be more)
• The youngest contributor to Koha was 14!!
  • During the Catalyst Open Source Academy in NZ

The most visible change in this version is the staff client! The old staff client was efficient, but not shiny – the new one is both shiny and efficient. We already had a shiny interface for the OPAC but now we gave the staff some eye candy as well.

A lot of attention has also been given to performance. Koha 1 and 2 were much faster than Koha 3, so it was time to speed things up in 3.8. One of the big changes in 3.8 is that the OPAC is now Plack compatible which will give 150% improved performance. Plack basically allows for the preloading of lots of data to save time. It is being used live on some French OPACs already!

Templates are now cached which gives us a 10% improvement in performance and memcache is now used for confirmation files giving another 10% improvement. Both of these do need to be activated first though – so that requires some setup.

Now for some “real” features (many are listed here already):

• Cataloging
  • Possible to upload your own cover images
  • Bulk delete bibliographic records when deleting the last item
  • Materials specified is now displayed at checkout and checkin
  • Authority matching and linking improvements
  • In cataloging if you got the material via acquisitions you will now see a link to that
• OPAC
  • Custom XSLT Stylesheets – you can now say: yes/no or link to a URL for custom stylesheet
  • Patrons can add star ratings
  • There is a way to show library information in the OPAC about the library when patrons mouse over the library name in the holdings table
    • This field takes HTML so you can even embed a map if you want
  • You can also turn on a bar of social network share buttons on each bib record in the OPAC
• Acquisitions
  • You can now see cancelled orders
  • It is possible to modify notes/comments on an order line even after the order is received
  • Cloning budgets allows for creating a duplicate budget
  • Improved claiming letters
  • You can now enter shipping estimates on the vendor page to help determine when orders should arrive
  • Purchase suggestions now automatically filters to show only suggestions from your patrons (this is important to note in case you’re used to seeing all the suggestions at once)
• Patrons
  • You can now group attributes
  • You can search for patron phones and emails
  • Fields on the patron add form can now be hidden using a system preference instead of jquery
  • From the checkout history there is a way to export a list of barcodes of items checked out
• Circulation
  • Hourly loans
  • Offline circulation improvements with a new Firefox plugin
  • Floating collections
  • Suspending holds
  • Checkout slips are now customizable

There are many more new features, but Paul ran out of time 🙂 Read the release notes for more info (and links to related manual pages).[tags]kohacon12[/tags]