This morning one of the Koha Librarians created a page on the Koha Wiki for everyone to share their Custom Reports/SQL statements. This from Owen at Athens County:

Koha users have begun building a library of useful SQL statements for use in building Koha reports. It’s on the Koha Wiki. You can add your own or put in a request for a report you’d like to know how to do. If you’d like to contribute you can either register on the site or use OpenID to log in. If you’ve never edited a wiki before, be sure to check out the Formatting Syntax article before you jump in.

Technorati Tags: koha

I’m at the Developers’ Meeting at KohaCon 2009 and they just went around the table with Tips & Tricks - here are my notes (sorry it’s not cleanly written):

Chris - Git has a built in garbage collector $ git gc - if you run it after creating a branch and before checking it out, makes switch branches much faster (make a branch, run this and then checkout the branch).  Also cluster ssh http://sourceforge.net/projects/clusterssh/ is a handy tool

Jesse - has a simple shell script that builds the environment

Joe - has a script he makes on different servers that he uses to get his shell to where he wants it to be for testing, it sets his self created variables and standard values (http://blogs.liblime.com/developers/2009/04/19/simple-shell-trick/).  Also he posted a good tip on the LibLime blog: http://blogs.liblime.com/developers/2009/04/10/simple-git-trick-for-bash/

Thomas - it’s important to remember that the real world of records is much more complicated than the record you see most frequently, so when testing things trying the really hard MARC records (Josh has a test file of really tough MARC records) will give you a better test base.  In the real world, you will find typos in ISBNs printed in the book - ISBNs that can’t possible be right or match our matching rules.  And also remember that records will lie about their encoding all of the time - and they seem to prefer it that way. 

Galen - One of the things that he does since he can’t claim to have the visual design skills that Owen does - he has become a real stickler about the HTML that is on the OPAC & Staff client - making it appear as XHTML.  There are tools in Firefox that can make for a good development environment: Fire Bug, for validation the HTML validator plugin in excellent at doing it quickly without submitting your site to an online validator, Firefox accessibility plugin lets you run automated tests against your site to meet requirements for ADA, Also the web developer plugin, Yahoo! Dev tools are slow, but they provide valuable info.  Something that is useful, but not a dev tool, is the Zotero plugin (citation manager) www.zotero.org — geared toward people to do lots of research online.  

Corey - Hasn’t done much dev work, but as far as install goes, if you install on red hat linux make sure you have lots of caffeine and the RPM packages

Agnes - Adds to Corey’s comment by saying she repeats his comment for 64 bit Zebra

Brendan - Fetch & Pull do not to the same thing!  He likes the graphical SQL interface and uses Cocoa (http://sourceforge.net/projects/freshmeat_mysql-cocoa/)

Everyone - Use Screen: http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/

Danny - took notes too: http://dbouman.blogspot.com/2009/04/general-koha-tips-and-tricks.html

Technorati Tags: kohacon09

Here’s a file I use to get myself into the correct environment for a given Koha installation. I create one of these for each Koha I’m using or testing, then just source the file into my shell to put myself in the right directory, with the right ENV variables set.

#!/bin/bash
#
# source this file, e.g.:
# . ./standard_export.sh

export KOHA_CONF=/home/atz/koha/etc/etc/koha-conf.xml
export KOHA_LOG=/home/atz/koha/log/production-intranet-error_log
export OPAC_LOG=/home/atz/koha/log/production-opac-error_log
export PERL5LIB=/home/atz/koha/production/koha
echo KOHA_LOG  = $KOHA_LOG
echo OPAC_LOG  = $OPAC_LOG
echo KOHA_CONF = $KOHA_CONF
echo PERL5LIB  = $PERL5LIB
cd $PERL5LIB

Having done battle with the koha code base for a few months, there have been too many times when something conceptually simple has been surprisingly difficult to express in code.

With KohaCon coming up soon, I thought I’d throw out this hypothetical question to get your creative juices flowing.

If you could do it all over again, how would you go about creating a Free library automation system from scratch?

(more…)

Chris Cormack shared this useful trick for keeping track of what git repo you are currently using/editing. Stick it in your .bash_profile to have your prompt adapt to the repo you are in!

function parse_git_branch {
  ref=$(git-symbolic-ref HEAD 2> /dev/null) || return
  echo "("${ref#refs/heads/}")"
}

RED    ="\[\033[0;31m\]"
YELLOW ="\[\033[0;33m\]"
GREEN  ="\[\033[0;32m\]"

PS1="$RED\$(date +%H:%M) \w$YELLOW \$(parse_git_branch)$GREEN\$ "