KohaCon13: Koha and Drupal

by Kyle Hall on Oct 17, 2013

Paul Poulan of BibLibre spoke about integrating Koha and Drupal at KohaCon13. Drupal is a Content Management System ( CMS ) which is verify flexible. It as thousands of add-on modules, and dozens of themes to manage the display and design of your Drupal site. Drupal is, like Koha, Free Open Source Software available under the GPL v2 license.

In Drupal, all information ( content ) created is known as anode. Every node has a node type. Each node type has it’s own display style.

We can integrate Koha and Drupal by considering bibliographic records as nodes. By doing so, you can create a website that seamlessly integrates your Koha catalog data with other content ( PDFs, articles, images, and more ).

This can be accomplished with the Drupal moduledrupal-opac which allows you to define node data such as title, author, subjects and more! Once this is done, the module can “harvest” the recode data out of Koha.

Advanced features such as authentication, pre-registration, item availability, holds, and other information are also supported by the Drupal-OPAC connector that allows Drupal to pull this data real-time from you Koha catalog.

Wheke includes the Drupal opac module drupal-ILS link, the Wheke responsive theme, a federated search module ( pzsearch, which connects to pazpar2 ), a discovery tool ( via Solr integration & search ), as well as dozens of Drupal modules useful for libraries ( forums, mailing lists, etc ).

To make this configuration easier, a special distribution ( Drupal with a collection of modules, themes, etc ) has been created namedWheke which is a Maori work for octopus.