KohaCon10: What's coming in Koha 3.4

by Nicole C. on Oct 24, 2010

Chris Cormack the first release manager for Koha was up next to talk about Koha 3.4 which he is also release manager for!

Koha 3.2 was a big feature release, 3.4 is going to have some new features, but is going to be more of a clean up release.

First the things that are of interest to the developers (librarians can skip down a bit):

• Database caching
• Improved Search API (Solr and other things to discuss)
• Database abstraction improvements (we are more tied to MySQL than we should be)
• New debian packaging
• Template Toolkit (versus the current templating we use)

For the librarians – what features do we hope to see in 3.4:

• Circulation: we want to avoid long lines at circulation, there will be performance improvements to speed things up
  • improve SIP2
  • improve transfers (a way to cancel a transfer easily)
  • offline circulation improvements
  • hourly loans
  • extended patron attributes
  • circ matrices for granular debarment
• Acquisitions
  • integration with financial management systems
  • adding some layers to acquisitions – like approval by supervisors if needed (for orders and payments)
  • the ability to set up multiple currencies per vendor
  • ability to change the percent discount when placing an order
• Cataloging
  • validate urls found in 856$u fields
  • analytic records
  • cataloging without knowing/using marc
• Patrons
  • duplicate card (create a card by cloning another patron)
• Tools
  • batch biblio modification
  • ways to show parts of your collection and not others (sounds like suppression)
  • improve call number splitting
• Serials
  • routines need refactoring
  • integrate with acquisitions better
  • binding
• Misc
  • single sign on services (CAS)
  • extend tagging module
  • fines split into tabs by categories

More info on most of the above can be found on the wiki under the 3.4 RFCs. There is no guarantee that all of these features will make it into Koha 3.4 because we are on a tight schedule (6 months) for this release to try and make it easier for developers and support companies. Also with 3.4 (unlike 3.2) there will be a QA Manager and several Bug Wranglers which should help with the quality assurance process (also speeding things up – in theory).

[tags]kohacon10[/tags]