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2 RELEASE NOTES FOR KOHA 3.0 ALPHA
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4 Koha 3 is the next-generation release of the award-winning Koha open-source
5 integrated library system.
7 These Release Notes cover What's New in Koha 3, information about the new
8 Revision control system (Git), and Version-release process, pointers to
9 Download, Installation, and Upgrade documentation, a brief introduction to the
10 new Templates, a call to Translation and Documentation writers, and finally,
11 Known Issues with this version.
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17 1. Zebra plugin - Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured
18 text indexing and retrieval engine. It supports large data sets (tens of
19 millions of records) and includes support for SRU, Z39.50 and several query
20 languages: CCL, CQL, and PQF. For more information about Zebra, please see:
22 http://indexdata.dk/zebra
24 Koha's new search engine, built on top of Zebra, supports features such as
25 relevance ranking, field weighting, truncation, stemming, use of fuzzy
26 operators, language-specific indexing, sorting, etc.
28 Indexes are updated in real-time with circulation transactions, enabling
29 limits by availability and statuses.
31 Faceted refine-by limits are available from both staff and opac interfaces.
33 For libraries that don't want the overhead of maintaing Zebra, Koha 3 ships
34 with a NoZebra option, in which bibliographic and authority data is indexed
37 2. New installer - based on the common Perl module ExtUtils::MakeMaker, the
38 new installer makes it a snap to get Koha running on just about any platform.
40 The installer comes complete with a Developer's Toolkit target ('dev') that
41 can be used to get a development environment linked directly to revision
42 control, to support rapid prototyping and an agile development process.
44 3. Standard APIs - Koha 3 supports a number of important library search and
45 retrieval standards and microformats, such as SRU/W, Z39.50
46 (http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/), UnAPI (http://unapi.info/) and
48 (http://ocoins.info; http://www.niso.org/committees/committee_ax.html).
50 Also supported is the popular Internet standard: OpenSearch
51 (http://opensearch.a9.com/) created by Amazon's A9.
53 Records are stored internally in an SGML-like format and can be retrieved in
54 MARCXML, Dublin Core, MODS, RSS, Atom, RDF-DC, SRW-DC, OAI-DC, and EndNote;
55 and the OPAC can be used by citation tools such as Zotero. Creating new
56 export formats is a trivial exercise in writing XSLT; records can be passed
57 through XSLT transformations either directly out of the index, or via a
58 separate parsing function.
60 To retrieve and interact with Circulation and Patron data, Koha 3 includes
61 support for 3M's Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP2), using the OpenNCIP
62 libraries (http://openncip.org).
64 There are also an ever-expanding set of native REST APIs to handle
65 interoperability with external tools such as third-party cataloging clients.
66 These APIs provide authentication as well as add/edit/delete control over
67 bibliographic data within a Koha system. For more information, see:
69 http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:web_services
71 Koha 3 also includes pluggable authentication - easy integration with LDAP and
72 Active Directory via the Auth_with_ldap module.
74 The Amazon.com module can be enabled to enrich bibliographic data with jacket
75 covers, professional reviews, ratings and comments from Amazon users, as well
76 as point to 'Similar Items' within the catalog. OCLC's xISBN, and
77 LibraryThing's ThingISBN can likewise be enabled to provide an 'Editions' tab
78 on item detail pages. New with Koha 3 is service throttling for these services,
79 to keep within subscription limits.
81 4. Cross-platform, multi-RDBMS, Web-server agnostic - Run Koha on the platform
82 of your choice: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris. Koha 3 also
83 includes better support for multi-RDBMS (MySQL 5.0 and PostgreSQL), and runs
84 under Apache2, IIS, or the web server of your choosing.
86 5. Multi-lingual support - Koha was designed from the ground up for multilingual
87 libraries. Koha 3 can handle Chinese, Japanese, and even right-to-left languages
88 such as Arabic and Hebrew with ease (BiDi).
90 Koha's index engine (Zebra) can handle record formats containing any UNICODE
91 compliant script, such as Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese and Korean. Zebra
92 has this support via the ICU libraries created and maintained by IBM.
94 You can translate Koha into your language using the built-in translation tools,
95 or by visiting http://translate.koha.org.
97 6. New templates - Koha's staff and patron interfaces are developed with a
98 template system that's easy to theme. The default templates are composed of 100%
99 valid XHTML and CSS. Koha aims to meet or exceed U.S. Government Section 508 and
100 W3C's WAI-AA standards for sight and motor impaired individuals. All
101 Javascript usage comes with fallback modes that work in any web browser.
103 7. Koha 3 has quite a few new modules, as well as enhancements to existing
104 modules, including: news writer, label creator, calendar, OPAC comments, MARC
105 staging and overlay, notices, transaction logs, guided reports with a data
106 dictionary and task scheduler, classification sources/filing rules.
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112 With Koha 3, we've started using a new distributed revision control system
113 called Git; it's the same system in use by many other projects, including the
114 Linux Kernel. To learn more about how to develop Koha using Git, please see
117 http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:git_usage
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123 With Koha 3, version numbering has been changed to use a method similar to
126 major.minor[.revision[.build]]
130 * revision: two-digit
133 This alpha release of Koha 3.0 is versioned 3.00.00.041. Every database change
134 or significant enough code change requires an update to the 'build' number,
135 and developers will be able to easily upgrade their systems using the built-in
138 Koha 3.0 Release Schedule:
140 This alpha release of Koha 3.0 will be followed by a beta release on Feb 1,
141 2008, including fixes to the following components:
143 * General Bugfixing (everyone)
144 * New API for item management (gmcharlt)
145 * MARC21 Authorities (gmcharlt)
146 * I18N/L10N, BiDi, lang detection (kados)
147 * OPAC Templates re-design (oleonard)
148 * Documentation and Translations (everyone)
150 The final stable release of Koha 3.0 is slated for March 1 2008 and will
151 include bugfixes to 3.0 beta.
153 Subsequent releases of 3.0 will be bugfix releases, and won't include any new
156 New features will be available in Koha 3.2 and subsequent releases.
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159 UPGRADING FROM A PREVIOUS VERSION OF KOHA
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162 The upgrade process from a previous version of Koha is documented on the Wiki
163 at the following page:
165 http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=22_to_30
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171 You may have heard that the templates for Koha 3 have been re-skinned; there
172 is also the start of a template style guide on the Wiki:
174 http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:documentation:templates_style_guide
176 Kudos to Owen Leonard and the Nelsonville Public Library for their
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183 Koha 3 alpha (this release) currently has complete translations for en-GB
184 (English) and fr-FR (French). The Koha Team welcomes additional translations;
185 please see http://www.kohadocs.org/usersguide/apb.html for information about
186 translating Koha, and join the koha-translate list to volunteer:
188 http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-translate
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194 User-contributed documentation for Koha 3 is available on the Koha Wiki
195 (http://wiki.koha.org). The Koha Team welcomes documentation contributions;
196 please join the Koha-devel list to volunteer:
198 http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel
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204 Known bugs are documented on the Koha wiki: http://bugs.koha.org and at the
205 3.0 RM's QA notes Wiki page:
207 http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:qanotes3.0