Spring is in the air: Refreshing your Koha OPAC via handy plugins

by Melissa Lefebvre on Feb 26, 2014

After the long winter for some of us in the north and the ice down south, we are all waiting for spring to arrive. The time to open our windows and clear out the dust but what about your OPAC? Is it looking dull? Has it not weathered the winter? Does it need a splash of color? With a few edits to OPACUserCSS system preference you can refresh your Koha OPAC and bring some life back to it.

Editing the OPACUserCSS is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, and you don’t need excessive CSS knowledge to do so. The easiest thing to do is install the Firebug plugin for Firefox, Chrome or Windows at https://getfirebug.com/downloads/. Once this is plugin is installed you can right click anywhere and choose “Inspect Element with Firebug‚Äù. By doing so a window will open on the bottom, and you can see what div that portion of the page is using and you also be able to see what CSS that portion is listed under. Firebug has a nifty aspect to it where you can edit the page live to see what it would look like before actually making the change to OPACUserCSS, just remember you’ll have to make your change there once you are happy with the color.

Another helpful plugin is ColorZilla. ColorZilla has an eyedropper aspect to the tool which you can click on any portion of the page and find out what the hex code for that color is. So if you have a favorite site which you love their color scheme you can see what hex code they are using and apply it to your Koha OPAC. Once you know what color your OPAC is currently using you can find where it’s referenced in OPACUserCSS and change it accordingly.

Not sure what color to use to freshen up your OPAC? Head over to this site http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colorpicker.asp. Here you can choose the color and then shade for the perfect color and the site provides you with the hex code. Be warned it’s sort of like standing in front of the color samples at Home Depot trying to pick the perfect color for your living room.

Between these three tools, you’ll be able to freshen up your Koha OPAC just in time for spring. Happy spring cleaning!