Ways to Support Developments in the Koha Community

by Kalleen Marquise on May 21, 2021

One of the unique and powerful aspects of the Open Source Community is that developments are community driven. We wanted to share information on how to support and contribute to developments and some of the exciting funding opportunities currently being crowdsourced.

How ByWater Solutions Contributes to the Development of Koha

ByWater Solutions fully embraces the ideals and practices of open source software. All custom development sponsored by our partners and developed internally is publicly available at ByWater's GitHub repositories.

After a development has been tested and approved by the sponsor, we submit the changes to the community in the preferred format (most often a patch or a pull request).

At ByWater, we believe transparency is a key to success. That is why we submit all the custom developments, plugins, tools and documentation we create. After all, sharing is caring! Our Development Team provides:

• Active leadership in the community
• Librarian driven enhancements
• 100% of code contributed to the community

Koha Crowdfunding Site

In 2015, ByWater Solutions launched a Development Website to create a resource for libraries across the world to gather ideas, share projects, and contribute funds to create new features in Koha that everyone would be able to benefit from. From that site alone, dozens of developments have been funded and put into the hands of all Koha users, for the greater good of the Koha Community.

How You Can Get Involved

Bugzilla - Set up an account in the Koha Community ticketing system to suggest new features, comment on other's suggestions, and vote for your favorite enhancements/features.

Community Dashboard- Stay connected to developments through this high-level view of work happening now in the community.

Koha Community- Participate in the Koha Community where you can find information on upcoming meetings (calendar), how to get involved, IRC information, and much more.

A Development We Are Very Excited About

We see value in all the suggested developments on the Koha Crowdfunding Site but our Development Team is currently very excited about a Koha development to enhance the Patron import process.

## Proposed development to Tools->Patron Import process

1. Staff using the patron import tool is presented the usual form, with a new checkbox: Review before commit.
2. Once the file is uploaded, and the checkbox checked, the patron is presented some potential import results, as with biblio imports: a summary, and a link to a new page for reviewing staged patron imports
3. The staged patron's page shows a list of patrons, if matched, the difference, potentially rendering the unblessed representation as well.


Find our more about sponsoring this development.

Learn More About Koha

Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. Koha’s impressive feature set continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. It includes modules for circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, reserves, patron management, branch relationships, and more.

Koha’s OPAC, circulation, management and self-checkout interfaces are all based on standards-compliant World Wide Web technologies, HTML5, CSS and Javascript, making Koha a truly platform-independent solution. Koha is distributed under the open-source General Public License (GPL). For more information about Koha, please visit: http://koha-community.org/.