KohaCon16: You have the power


Hello fellow Koha-enthusiasts! We’ve just ended this year’s KohaCon 2016 by sharing a wonderful dinner together in Thessaloniki. At the hackfest today (thanks to Gaetan Boisson, Katrin Fischer, and Jonathan Druart), we got to see some behind-the-scenes action on how bugs are created, patched, and how they ultimately pass QA.

Yes! We really did that – and it was awesome!

Did you know that you have the power to move along bug fixes and enhancements in Koha? Today someone voiced a question that many of us have asked internally: “can we write a patch, even if we are not experts yet?”. Lovely Katrin answered that one – “of course!” Everyone has to start somewhere.

The community is very supportive! There’s a little bit of a learning curve, andthere are some resources that you may find useful. I cannot stress enough the value of the Koha wiki:https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Main_Page.

I use it all the time as a migration specialist, especially the page containing the table of Koha’s item fields, but there is so much more stored here that you can use to your full advantage. You canreferencethis page in particular to learn the process of testing bugs in sandboxes:https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Sandboxes.

Today I also learned that you can choose which bugs to work on based on their level of difficulty. I did the following:

Anything with a “tri” in this column has a severity of *trivial*, and it might be a little easier to start with these sort of bugs. You can also search for categories that interest you the most, and you can certainly work on bugs that you believe your library would love to have fixed.

My hope is that I’ve conveyed how easy it really is to get involved in the community. Not many of us can say we’ve had such a direct impact on an entire ILS system! Take it from me, a recent newbie – you won’t regret it!

 

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