Coming soon, to a TPAC near you....

It is now finished.

Having received the approval from MassLNC, the project sponsors, I have pushed a cleaned up branch of the code to the Evergreen working repository and added a "pullrequest" tag to the LaunchPad bug.These are the first steps in getting something accepted into the official Evergreen code base. With any luck, this will make it into the 2.3.0 final release.

This project was generously funded by MassLNC.

Almost There

As the above screenshot shows, I basically have this working. There are a few rough edges to be smoothed over such as redirecting to the search page after adding a record to bookbag and making similar changes on the individual record view, but most of the hard stuff is finished. A couple of currently missing features still need to be implemented.

Looks like the work will definitely be finished by the July 1 deadline.

"He's NOT the Messiah!"

This isn't strictly an Evergreen post, though I did the work in the context of my role as the Chief Bug Wrangler for Evergreen/Open-ILS.

Release days are always busy for me, since one of my tasks is to go through the various milestones leading up to the release and changing all of the "Fix Committed" bug to "Fix Released." In addition, I have to create a new milestone for the next bug fix release and move any remaining bugs to that new milestone. Of these two tasks, the first is generally the most time consuming.

I have been looking for a way to automate some of this, and last night, I finally hit pay dirt.

Some Progress to Show

I can report some progress on the add to permanent book list feature for TPac. There is now actually some code that does something visible in my repository.

So far, I believe I have worked out how to set a bookbag/list to be a patron's default list. When a logged in patron accesses their lists in TPac for the first time, they will see this:

You can see above that the patron in question, me, has no default list chosen. After clicking the "Make Default List" button next to the "My List" entry, the patron's list screen will look like this:

I know you are probably thinking, "That's it? What has he been doing for the past couple weeks?" "Working on other things," is the answer. I was hoping to get more time to work on this, but other things have come up. It should be done real soon, now, on the order of a week or two depending on how much free time I can steal at home.

For those of you following along at home.

Just thought that I'd mention that I started coding the work mentioned in my previous blog post.

I have created a publicly accessible git branch for those of you following along at home.

Ability to add titles to permanent book lists

I have been hired to work on this.

My proposed implementation basically covered the following:

1. Add an ou setting to enable the warning when adding to a temporary list: opac.temporary_list.warn. This will function so that if it is not set or set to off, then the software behaves as it currently does for adding to a temporary list.

2. Add an actor usr setting for holding the name of a default book list: opac.my_list.default.

3. Add a checkbox on the my list interface to indicate that a certain list should be the default list for adding titles.

4. Modify opac/record and opac/results so that if a patron is logged in their my lists will populate a drop down with the default list selected. Clicking on add to my list will add to the list currently selected in the drop down.

5. If a logged in patron does not have a list, then the behavior will be the same as for a patron who is not logged in.

6. If a patron is not logged in, the add to my list will appear the same as it does currently.

7. Clicking on add to my list will check the ou setting mentioned in above in 1. If that setting is on it will display a warning page to the patron that the item has been added to a temporary list.

8. There will be a checkbox on this warning page so that if it is checked when the patron dismisses the warning page, a session cookie will be set to indicate that the patron does not want any more warnings about the temporary list.

9. Logged in users will be able to skip all such warnings via a user setting: opac.temporary_list.warn.

The above was amended at an impromptu meeting held during the 2012 International Conference in Indianapolis:

• We selected the attached mock-up as the model.

• We would like some type of border around the dropdown so that it doesn’t blend into the background (a css class for this element will allow us to customize this).

• The behavior for non-logged-in users will essentially be the same as described in [the] proposal.

• For logged-in users, the temporary list will appear first followed by the patron’s existing lists. The default list will appear at the top.

• There will also be an option to "add to new list" at the bottom of the dropdown.

• There will be a cap on the number of lists that display here. If a user owns more lists, there will be a "See All" option that will lead them to a new page where they can select the right list.

• There will be a separate css class for the "Temporary List" element and the "Add to New List" element.

So far, I’ve got a working mockup of the menu that uses only CSS. Since it is CSS, it can easily be styled differently from what you see in the screen shot above. In fact, my current mockup does a reverse video effect on the open menu, with white text on a dark green background.

I’ll update my progress as things develop. (Ahem.)

Evergreen 2.0.11 Release Announcement

From the day late and a dollar short department.

Today, the Evergreen development team released Evergreen 2.0.11, the final bug fix release for the Evergreen 2.0 series. This release includes fixes for over 35 publicly reported bugs as listed here: https://launchpad.net/evergreen/+milestone/2.0.11

This announcement ends the community’s general support for the Evergreen 2.0 series. There will be no future 2.0 releases, with the exception of those addressing security issues through August 14 2012. There will be absolutely no community releases of the 2.0 series after that date, so any sites still using the 2.0 series in production are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 2.1 or 2.2 by that date.

The release is available for download at http://evergreen-ils.org/downloads

Note: I’m the Evergreen 2.0 release maintainer. Well, for the 2.0.11 release anyway.