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Never mind Labor Day — it has been Labor Month, as developers from around the Evergreen community have continued to put shoulders to the wheel on both Acquisitions (due out later, in 2.0 — see the Roadmap) and in 1.4. We also tuned and fiddled with varied websites, including this one, as we discuss below.
Acquisitions
We’ve held two webinars about Acquisitions and are holding a special webinar just for PINES libraries (the mother ship) tomorrow. We recorded the August 27 session (we would have recorded the August 13 session, except among other mishaps I forgot to press the big red button labeled RECORD).
The recording of the 8-27 session starts out in media res — you can hear Bill Erickson, lead acquisitions developer speaking, as well as me and a cast of thousands. We’ll post future webinars, perhaps a bit more polished, with titles and credits… Windows Movie Maker hangs when I try to do that, and yes you can laugh at me. (Sorry for the Microsoft format — the choices were limited.)
Note that a busy month has passed, with more work done, and more to follow. You can poke at the Evergreen acquisitions development server (guaranteed to be unstable much of the time). And see also the KCLS Acquisitions specifications, which Evergreen developers have found useful as well, and finally, the Evergreen acquisitions timeline.
Now that we’re (ok, I’m) more comfortable with the web conferencing software, we’ll make invitations broader for other events, as well. Expect at least one “Meet 1.4” webinar in October, which brings us to…
Release 1.4
Release Candidate 1.4 is on target for late September. Over on the Equinox blog (which moved to a small commercial ISP for easier management) you can find a discussion of two of the features in 1.4. Expect more this week.
This Site
The perspicacious among you may notice that this blog has been updated to a (much) newer version of WordPress (and now sports a title consonant with the community’s decision about the name). If no one else gets to it I’ll slide in a widget-friendly WordPress theme sometime this week.
In fact, all of evergreen-ils.org has been updated. Kudos to Shawn Boyette of Equinox for his work making that happen! (Various FAQs, download instructions, and the like have also been upgraded by yours truly, with help from many others, over the past couple of months.)
The driving force for the site upgrade was Dokuwiki, used for Evergreen’s documentation. At the moment, the evergreen-ils Dokuwiki doesn’t look materially different — but it has been upgraded to a version that enables friendlier features, which will in turn make it more inviting for community members who are not to a command-line born. “It takes a village” to grow an open source project — and finding comfort zones for all of its participants is part of the challenge (and fun) of OSS.
— Karen, Equinox Community Librarian