RELEASE NOTES FOR KOHA 21.05.00

28 May 2021

Koha is the first free and open source software library automation package (ILS). Development is sponsored by libraries of varying types and sizes, volunteers, and support companies from around the world. The website for the Koha project is:

Koha 21.05.00 can be downloaded from:

Installation instructions can be found at:

Koha 21.05.00 is a major release, that comes with many new features.

It includes 6 new features, 248 enhancements, 449 bugfixes.

A Technical highlights section is included at the bottom of these notes for those seeking a short summary of the more technical changes included in this release.

System requirements

You can learn about the system components (like OS and database) needed for running Koha here: https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/System_requirements_and_recommendations

Significant changes

Accounting

Work has continued on refactoring the accounting code this cycle. The 'Point of sale' and 'Cash management' features have been further enhanced to better expose cash-up functionality to the user interface and aid in auditing processes and effort has been made to ensure all accountline actions are properly recording using double entry accounting methods with offsets to link income to debts.

Transfers

A significant amount of work has gone into refactoring the transfers system to enable future enhancements and improve maintainability. Transfers can now be queued and a priority system exists for the various mechanisms that can trigger a transfer. Additionally, an audit trail is now left in place to allow future debugging to take place. This has helped us to resolve a number of long standing bugs and edge cases in the transfers process.

Accessibility

Work has continued to make Koha more accessible:

PayPal support

Paypal support has been dropped from Koha core and moved to a plugin [23215]

New features

Acquisitions

Cataloging

MARC Bibliographic data support

Staff Client

System Administration

Enhancements

Acquisitions

Architecture, internals, and plumbing

Authentication

Cataloging

Circulation

Command-line Utilities

Fines and fees

Hold requests

Installation and upgrade (command-line installer)

Label/patron card printing

MARC Bibliographic data support

MARC Bibliographic record staging/import

Notices

OPAC

Patrons

Plugin architecture

REST API

Reports

SIP2

Searching

Searching - Elasticsearch

Serials

Staff Client

System Administration

Templates

Test Suite

Tools

Web services

Critical bugs fixed

(This list includes all bugfixes since the previous major version. Most of them have already been fixed in maintainance releases)

Acquisitions

Architecture, internals, and plumbing

Authentication

Cataloging

Circulation

Command-line Utilities

Database

Fines and fees

Hold requests

Holidays

I18N/L10N

Installation and upgrade (command-line installer)

Installation and upgrade (web-based installer)

Lists

MARC Authority data support

Notices

OPAC

Packaging

Patrons

Plugin architecture

REST API

Reports

SIP2

Searching

Searching - Elasticsearch

Searching - Zebra

Serials

Staff Client

System Administration

Templates

Test Suite

Tools

Web services

Other bugs fixed

(This list includes all bugfixes since the previous major version. Most of them have already been fixed in maintainance releases)

About

Acquisitions

Architecture, internals, and plumbing

Authentication

Browser compatibility

Cataloging

Circulation

Command-line Utilities

Database

Developer documentation

Fines and fees

Hold requests

I18N/L10N

ILL

Installation and upgrade (web-based installer)

Lists

MARC Authority data support

MARC Bibliographic data support

MARC Bibliographic record staging/import

Mana-kb

Notices

OPAC

Patrons

Plugin architecture

REST API

SIP2

Searching

Searching - Elasticsearch

Searching - Zebra

Serials

Staff Client

System Administration

Task Scheduler

Templates

Test Suite

Tools

Web services

Z39.50 / SRU / OpenSearch Servers

New system preferences

Renamed system preferences

Deleted system preferences

New Authorized value categories

New letter codes

Technical highlights

Some significant technical changes were made behind the scenes in this release and it was felt that they should be additionally highlighted in the notes as they could be easily missed above.

Dev tools

REST API Enhancements

Translatability/installer

The specific .sql files from the installer directory will be removed in the upcoming release. A workgroup will be formed during the 21.11 development cycle to remove the remaining ones. So far we got rid of de-DE, es-ES, it-IT, pl-PL, ru-RU and uk-UA. The remaining ones are fr-FR, fr-CA, nb-NO. You can see the work on the omnibus bug report [27829]. If you are using one of these languages and their .sql files, please contact the core team to tell us what you want to keep from them.

Test suite

Errors handling

The RaiseError flag is now set on the DB handler. That means we will never fail a SQL query silently. That might lead to unexpected explosion (server error 500) but will help the development team to catch remaining bug. To avoid displaying an ugly "Software error" page, we created an error page that is nicely integrated into Koha.

Another effect of this change is that the update database process will not stop if something wrong happened during the upgrade procedure.

Documentation

The Koha manual is maintained in Sphinx. The home page for Koha documentation is

As of the date of these release notes, the Koha manual is available in the following languages:

The Git repository for the Koha manual can be found at

Translations

Complete or near-complete translations of the OPAC and staff interface are available in this release for the following languages:

Partial translations are available for various other languages.

The Koha team welcomes additional translations; please see

For information about translating Koha, and join the koha-translate list to volunteer:

The most up-to-date translations can be found at:

Release Team

The release team for Koha 21.05.00 is

Credits

We thank the following libraries, companies, and other institutions who are known to have sponsored new features in Koha 21.05.00

We thank the following individuals who contributed patches to Koha 21.05.00

We thank the following libraries, companies, and other institutions who contributed patches to Koha 21.05.00

We also especially thank the following individuals who tested patches for Koha

We thank the following individuals who mentored new contributors to the Koha project

And people who contributed to the Koha manual during the release cycle of Koha 21.05.00

We regret any omissions. If a contributor has been inadvertently missed, please send a patch against these release notes to koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org.

Notes from the Release Manager

Thanks to those who are working everyday to make Koha better day after day.

I would like to thank especially the whole development team and all those who contributed to the different topics from the roadmap we defined at the beginning of the release cycle.

I am excited to continue as release manager for one more development cycle. We, as a community, are comforting our capacity to work together and are continuously becoming more efficient. A lot of stimulating and interesting challenges are waiting for us.

Join us if it's done yet!

Enjoy this new version of Koha!

Revision control notes

The Koha project uses Git for version control. The current development version of Koha can be retrieved by checking out the master branch of:

The branch for this version of Koha and future bugfixes in this release line is master.

Bugs and feature requests

Bug reports and feature requests can be filed at the Koha bug tracker at:

He rau ringa e oti ai. (Many hands finish the work)

Autogenerated release notes updated last on 28 May 2021 09:08:25.