[Koha] From the Kaitiaki

[Pat Eyler]

                                                   7 June, 2002
To the Koha community;

Kia Ora,
I'd like to thank everyone for their hard work this last week.  I'd
also like to thank three individuals have have agreed to help manage
the Koha project:
   Chris Cormack is our 1.2 release manager
   Paul Poulain is our 1.4 release manager
   Nicholas Rosasco is our advocacy/recruiting manager

I received some good feedback from my letter last week, thanks.  I
look forward to hearing from more of you as the project continues to
grow, please don't hesitate to write to me at <pate at gnu.org>.  I'll
try to get back to you quickly.  Among the other feedback that we got
was a notice on the <http://www.oss4lib.com> website.  There are a lot
of other projects there, I'd encourage you all to take a look at what
people are working on.  I think that there is a lot of ground for
cooperation (for example, the MARC::Record Perl module which we'll be
using for our 1.4 release).

We've accomplished a lot recently, and it looks like the pace is just
going to pick up.  I'd like to talk briefly about what's happened and
what on the horizon.

   1.2
       Many more clean ups and improvements have been made.  Alan
       Millar, Mike Mylonas, Finlay Thompson, and Chris Cormack have
       been particularily active.  There are some additional bits of
       work that should see their way into the 1.2 series as well.

       The 1.2.0 release is just around the corner, in fact a 1.2.0-rc2
       tarball has been cut and is available at:
         <http://developer.koha.org/koha-1.2.0-rc2.tar.gz>.

       This release will be coordinated with a number of announcements
       in fairly high profile areas.  This should result in a flurry
       of testing, use, and improvement that will carry us through a
       solid series of 1.2.X releases.

       One of the most exciting enhancements in the 1.2 series will be
       templates.  This will not only allow libraries to easily change
       the look of Koha at their own site, but will allow us to make
       translations much easier.

   1.4
       Paul Poulain, Steve Tonnesen, and Sergey Yanovitsky have been
       hard at work laying out a database schema for MARC.  Now that
       they're down to dotting I's and crossing T's, they're going to
       be starting on a clean API for developers.  These two pieces
       will provide the foundation for a stronger, faster, better
       Koha.

   Translations
       In addition to our hopes for Spanish and Polish, Paul Poulain
       has started a French translation.  If you'd like to show your
       cultural pride, please consider helping translate Koha.

   Documentation
       Nicholas Rosasco has started writing our documentation.  We
       already have some volunteers, but could certainly use more.
       Even if you can only contribute a little time to read it and
       give us your feedback, or to write a short article, your help
       will be appreciated.

I hope you've enjoyed this note.  My plan is to send out a 'State of
the Project' note like this on a weekly basis to keep everyone up to
date.  I'll continue posting them to our wiki[1] as well.


Haere ra,
-pate


Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki of the Koha Project


[1] <http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=KohaProject>