Koha Hackfest 2024

This year’s hackfest was awesome!

I was staying at Toyoko Inn near Gare St. Charles which I would recommend. The rooms do give off a strong Japanese vibe. 🇯🇵 It was a relatively good deal, everything was nice and tidy and the location was fine. It’s a steep walk back if you’re drunk, though.

We had lots of great discussions about infrastructure, Koha’s architecture and debated a lot of organizational things as well. For instance

Should we make Koha more modular by moving less core stuff into plugins?
How can we melt off the myriad of system preferences?
How can we improve the way we work together as a community?

Plugins as first-class citizens

The idea is basically to move things that aren’t universally useful into plugins. This however necessitates that plugins themselves become more flexible and can do a lot more. We currently are using hooks for basic to more involved things and that’s also a solid path forward. I want those hooks to stay explicit and was against the idea of using AUTOLOAD and other perl magic to add that needed flexibility.

I would just repeat what domm has already written, so please just read this Explicit vs Implicit Hooks.

In essence: I think we just need more hooks!

The other thing is the plugin store. This is something that already kind of exists within Koha, for info read the docs. But now we want to take it a step further. We want an external (hopefully pretty) store where you can search for solutions that are more tailored to your use cases. We also want a rating and verification system that acts as a stamp of approval if something’s deemed as a product of quality after community QA for example. I love this idea and will support it whenever I can.

System Preferences

We have too many. 😃

Some interesting ideas were floating around. For example

Labeling a subset of system preferences that are deemed essential to configuring a production instance.
Only conditionally show system preferences if their “parent”-preferences are enabled. Great idea, although this is already present in a way. But this is a good time to start formalizing it.
Also plugins need a good abstraction for integrating their sysprefs natively into Koha!

This is still a work in progress but I like where it’s going.

Our way of working

We had a long talk about improving the way we communicate. I’ll spare you the details because you had to be there but we got a new shiny toy from this debate: Mattermost. If you’re still on IRC please consider joining.

This tool has woken up a dormant dragon. Still, after a month, we have an influx of people and we also leverage the simplicity for stellar integrations with the community infrastructure. It also seems that we’re finally able to connect the developers to the librarians. If you join, say hi @paulderscheid.

As they say: communication is key!

Misc

Of course visiting the pubs, bars, and restaurants in Marseille is always a pleasure. So many great conversations..

I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone next year again.

Written by Paul Derscheid on 09 May 2024