[Koha] Koha and Drupal

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Hello Henri-Damien, many thanks for your so detailed response !

> you may find on git.biblibre.com koha_biblibre.git (which are also on
> git.koha-community.org/koha.git in so far as all the ils-di required
> infrastructure is concerned), sopac.git and locuum.git and insurge.git,
> which contains all the patches we had to do to install SOPAC on top of a
> Koha installation.

Okay, many thanks for the pointers !

> It is working but it not that handy to install.

I see. Does it mean that, altough it is difficult to install, once the
initial installation is done it is working relatively well and easy to
maintain ?

> And some choices for SOPAC makes that project quite difficult to run
> (namely sphinx and the insurge/locum technology and the fact that it
> relies on old drupal version), along with quite hard coded css quite
> restrict the potential of SOPAC.

Okay. I'd like to ask several questions here.
1. Which version of drupal does it rely on ?
2. I have to say I did not understand what locum and insurge are. Any
clue for me ?

> We tried to contribute the patches we wrote in order to fix some bugs.
> But it is free software, ppl may or may not take on your contributions
> and proposals.

Indeed. Does it mean that there are currently no exchanges with sopac
maintainers ?

> It is in production for some libraries. We can assist in the realization
> of that or provide you with url for that.

I'm interested in any URL. I'm trying to build yet another digital
library. Now that I know about Koha and how good it is for cataloging
and exploring an OPAC, I have to say it is difficult for me to renounce
to powerful cataloguing/opac features. My first idea was ths a three
component solution: Drupal for the protal, Koha for the OPAC and a third
component yet to be chosen to handle files pertaining to each book.
Such an approach has, however, several pitfalls: it is heavy and there
is a problem if one wants to share authenticaiton. So I thought that
SOPAC could help: the (Koha) OPAC and Drupal would merge, and then I
could use Drupal to store and give access to the files associated with
each book.

Any comment here would be warmly appreciated.

> We are still convinced that drupal is really a nice thing and the fact
> that solr could be also used in drupal could make it really handy.

Yeah I'd love to be able to use drupal for my digital library, find it
rather convenient, too.

> Maybe you could also take a look at mkdrul from indexdata and find
> something interesting.

Is such a module interesting even when you'd query only one Z39.50
server ? In my case, I think I'd query only my local Koha where
everything would be catalogued. And would such an approach let one see
from within drupal the virtual shelves defined in Koha. And finally: the
fact that it seems to rely heavily on javascript makes me think it would
perhaps not be very accessible, but I didn't try it out...

> Hope that helps.

It helps, thanks a lot and best wishes,
Sébastien.