Evergreen 3.0 first beta release available

The first beta release of Evergreen 3.0 is now available for testing from the downloads page.

Evergreen 3.0 will be a major release that includes:

• community support of the web staff client for production use
• serials and offline circulation modules for the web staff client
• improvements to the display of headings in the public catalog browse list
• the ability to search patron records by date of birth
• copy tags and digital bookplates
• batch editing of patron records
• better support for consortia that span multiple time zones
• and numerous other improvements

For more information on what’s available in the beta release, please read the initial draft of the release notes.

Users of Evergreen are strongly encouraged to use the beta release to test new features and the web staff client; bugs should be reported via Launchpad. A second beta release that is to include bugfixes and support for Debian Stretch is scheduled to be made on 20 September.

Evergreen admins installing the beta or upgrading a test system to the beta should be aware of the following:

• The minimum version of PostgreSQL required to run Evergreen 3.0 is PostgreSQL 9.4.
• The beta release will work on OpenSRF 2.5.0, but OpenSRF 2.5.1 is expected to be released over the next few days and will be recommended for further testing of the Evergreen beta.  In particular, if you run into difficulties retrieving catalog search results, please see OpenSRF bug 1709710 for some workarounds.
• Evergreen 3.0 requires that the open-ils.qstore service be active.
• SIP2 bugfixes in Evergreen 3.0 require an upgrade of SIPServer to be fully effective.

Evergreen 3.0.0 will be a large, ambitious release; testing during beta period will be particularly important for a smooth release on 6 October.