Evergreen ILS

Open Source Library Software

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On the Road to 3.0: Small Enhancements to Improve the Staff Experience

The upcoming Evergreen 3.0 release, scheduled for October 3, 2017, will bring along a lot of improvements for staff and patrons at Evergreen libraries. Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight some of our favorite new features in the On the Road to 3.0 video series.

In the first installment of the series, we look at small feature enhancements that will improve the staff experience in Evergreen.

Do you want to be the first to know of new videos in this series as they are added? Be sure to subscribe to our new EvergreenILS YouTube channel.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvUK628agjE

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.

Evergreen 3.0 development update #15: feature freeze


A swimming Fulvous whistling duck (Dendrocygna bicolor). CC-BY-SA by Nnc.banzai via Wikimedia Commons

The past couple weeks have been a bit busy.

Since the previous update, another 199 patches have made their way into master. Today marks feature freeze; after today, no additional patches that add new features should be merged to master.

Why? September is going to be mostly concerned with making Evergreen 3.0.0 as stable and bug-free as possible, particularly with respect to the web staff client. However, there are a few exceptions to the freeze, including:

  • small additions to the web staff client that ensure that it has functional parity with the XUL client
  • improvements to the internationalization tools
  • support for the current Debian stable release, stretch.

A beta release is scheduled to be built on 6 September, and the name of the game henceforth is TEST ALL THE THINGS. I think it’s distinctly possible that a second beta release will be needed by mid-September, and I also expect one or two OpenSRF releases over the next couple weeks.

So, how have we done so far? A look at the roadmap shows a lot of things marked as done, including:

  • web staff client offline circulation and serials modules
  • metabib display fields
  • improvements to catalog search performance and completeness
  • significant improvements to headings browses in the public catalog
  • better support for multi-timezone consortia
  • batch patron editing
  • copy tags and digital bookplates
  • searching for patron records by birth date
  • adding the ability to search for a patron from the place hold interface in the staff interface
  • transits can now be canceled instead of deleted outright
  • the integration with OverDrive and OneClickDigital now allows ebook hold requests and loans to be done without leaving the Evergreen OPAC
  • patrons can now suspend their hold requests when they create them
  • report templates can now be searched

We’re well on track to meet the primary release goal of 3.0: full community support of the web staff interface. There are still some bugs to sort out, but that’s why we have Bug Squashing Weeks; the next one is scheduled for 11-15 September.

Remember: TEST ALL THE THINGS.

Duck trivia

The first known patent for a duck call in the U.S. was issued to Elam Fisher in 1870.

Submissions

Updates on the progress to Evergreen 3.0 will be published every Friday until general release of 3.0.0. If you have material to contribute to the updates, please get them to Galen Charlton by Thursday morning.