Evergreen Release Candidate 1.4 Available

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On Friday, October 17, 2008, the Evergreen community released Evergreen 1.4, Release Candidate 1. It is linked on the project website downloads page.

As noted elsewhere, in software, a release candidate (or RC) is similar to a political candidate: it should have a strong platform, it should be more “walk” than “talk,” and it’s out there for evaluation.

RC 1.4 is suitable for testing new installations of Evergreen and trying out the great new features available in version 1.4. Partial upgrade instructions from the 1.2 series are available and will evolve throughout the Release Candidate process.

This will not be the last Release Candidate for 1.4, but barring major issues other than installation and upgrade cleanup, it is very close. We invite and encourage you to download and install this version for testing purposes but recommend that you wait until the final 1.4.0.0 release for production use. This version of Evergreen requires version 1.0 or greater of OpenSRF, also on the downloads page.

You can read more about 1.4 on the Evergreen Development Roadmap.

Also see this post from Equinox Software describing just two of 1.4’s features — courtesy notices and non-SIP self-check.

Here are a few of the outward-facing 1.4 features and the status of their development in RC 1.4:

  • Improved administrative interfaces for defining organizations and permissions — in place
  • New interface for circulation rules –the back-end is in place, the UI is imminent
  • Credit card payments — back-end completed, awaiting community discussion on interface
  • Multi-source Z39.50 search for staff — in place. The UI hasn’t been finished for configuring the Z targets, but these can still be set in the script.
  • Pre-overdue (reminder) notices — in place
  • SRU/Z39.50 server — in place
  • Publication date filtering in advanced OPAC search — in place
  • Preferred-language setting at both system and organizational level for search results is in place in the back-end, though we need a little more work to make this available in the UI.
  • Web-based batch record importer/exporter (Vandelay) — done, except for the UI for holdings import
  • Unrecovered debt — mostly done, with a little permissions work needed to wrap it up

Congratulations to the developers — and please do test this out and report back!