The Evergreen software development team has spent the past couple of days attending the PINES Annual Membership meeting and demonstrating the progress we’ve made so far with Evergreen. We are now ready to release the circulation demo to everyone, and instructions are below for accessing the software.
Also, on a related topic, we’ve come to an important milestone in the Evergreen project. When we started on this path, we determined that we would stop approximately a year into the project, assess our progress, and determine if we should continue. We’ve come to this point, and the PINES Executive Committee has unanimously “blessed” the Evergreen project, and gave their permission for the project to continue. We’re very excited about this decision.
Back to the Circulation demo, this release includes some new basic circulation functionality as well as some previously released cataloging functionality. Also, ahead of schedule, a portion of the re-made Evergreen OPAC is back and ready for review. The partial demo OPAC is available here: http://gapines.org/opac/
If you would like to install the Evergreen staff client demo on your computer, follow the instructions below. Alternatively, if you would just like to view screenshots, you can certainly just follow the walk-through below without actually installing the software.
Instructions for installing the demo:
(Note: in the production version of the software, the following multiple installation steps will not be required.)
If you are behind a firewall, you must allow outgoing connections on port 80.
In order to test this demo release, you must download and install the Firefox web browser on your local machine. You may download Firefox from this location:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
(The download link is in the upper-right corner of that page.)
After downloading and installing Firefox, download the Evergreen staff client package from here:
(Note: This demo will expire on June 3rd) http://open-ils.org/downloads/evergreen.xpi
You should right-click on the above link and choose Save Link As… and then save the evergreen.xpi file to your Desktop.
Then, from within Firefox, choose the option File -> Open File from the menubar at the top. Find and open the evergreen.xpi file from the resulting Open File dialog window.
A dialog will pop-up asking if you would like to install the software. Choose Install Now.
Once the xpi file has been installed, you must completely restart Firefox.
After restarting Firefox, you must enter the following text into the address/location bar and press the enter key.
chrome://evergreen/content/
This will present you with Evergreen’s Login Window. At this point you should probably turn down the volume on your computer. Some of our error messages are accompanied with various beeps, whistles, and shrieking, and as this is not even alpha-quality software yet, you may encounter some loud errors. To login, enter the username demo and the password demo.
Evergreen’s main window will then pop-up with the PINES and Evergreen names and the PINES logo. Note that this isn’t any sort of official Evergreen logo– we’re just playing around.
Pressing Function 2 or choosing Circulation -> Check In from the top menubar will bring up the Check In interface.
Like Firefox, Evergreen presents the user with a “tabbed” interface. Press Control+T or choose File -> New Tab from the top menubar. Then press Function 1 or choose Circulation -> Check Out to bring up the Check Out interface in the new tab.
You may then click on each tab to bring up the corresponding interface, or alternately, cycle between them by pressing Control+Tab, or jump directly to one or the other by pressing Alt+0 or Alt+1. Evergreen will have extensive keyboard support in the production release.
