Koha Hackfest 2025

As always, this year’s hackfest was a lot of fun!

The Hotel

Ibis Vieux Port may not be the most luxurious hotel, but you can’t beat the location. Just a few minutes away from great restaurants and bars like Les Berthom (large selection of beers), O’Malley’s (great pub) or La Crêpe au Carré (great food at a great price). It’s always a pleasure to just have to walk a few minutes to get to a cozy bed. 😗

The Event

The event took place at Biblibre’s new office in Marseille. The audience is growing every year, but we still managed to fit. I am very thankful for the work involved in hosting the event. The big topics this year for me were:

Theming options for the staff interface

We just had a quick chat and discussed some tasks that are needed to make it work. We decided on:

• Using CSS variables for at least the colors in the first step throughout our extended Bootstrap theme.
• Picking a default color palette for the dark mode that will be possible once we clean up some outliers and inlined styles.
• Building a simple configuration UI to pick different themes, which will be possible once we remove the hardcoded values.

The Vue Architecture Rethink

It basically comes down to: there’s a lot of duplicated code throughout our Vue components in Koha. Pedro and Matt from Open Fifth built some abstractions (BaseComponents to extend from) to start solving the problem. It’s awesome, and I want to use it!

OPAC modernization

This is an idea we at LMSCloud cooked up.

1. The first step is to do the same thing as for the staff interface: move everything to CSS variables.
2. Then we’d like to build a design system and an open component library for Koha that can be easily adapted to all kinds of use cases throughout the library landscape.
3. Once we achieve that milestone, we’d like to think about some more complex changes like making the search results, record details pages, as well as global UI elements more customizable with a more modular use of XSLT, which we also discussed in a separate session. For dynamic content, we’d like to benefit from the Vue Architecture rethink 👆 and a little work Matt and I did last year to allow for Vue islands within our SSR’d Template Toolkit pages.

Stay tuned 📡

The Future

The atmosphere at the hackfest was great, and I am very happy about that. I always enjoy the productive discussions and the engagement on Bugzilla during this particular week of the year. Strategic planning over beers and food is a winning combination. 🍻

I am looking forward to the next hackfest in 2026!

PS: There’s another great writeup of the hackfest from domm.

Written by Paul Derscheid on 05 Apr 2025