Koha Development
How to Start the Process
- Submit a ticket to ByWater Solutions with your workflow or idea.
- If your proposed functionality requires custom development, ByWater Solutions will communicate with you to clarify your goals and needs. You can read more about our mission and philosophy here.
- Once we have a clear understanding of your request, it will be discussed by a small group of ByWater developers and educators to produce a rough spec of the work to be done along with a size category and minimum estimated cost.
- If you approve the rough spec and minimum estimated cost, your request moves on to the full group of ByWater developers, who will produce a full spec and works with our sales team to provide a formal quote.
- If you wish to fully fund the work, the project moves on to contracting and invoicing. Alternatively, you may request that the project be added to ByWater's Crowdsourcing page to see other interested libraries to help cover the cost.
Koha Community Development Cycle
The Koha community uses Bugzilla to track bugs and enhancements, and every piece of code follows a standard path to production.
Under the release schedule on the Koha Community Website, there is a complete breakdown of how code gets into Koha.
When is my bug going to be fixed?
It’s upgrade time, and you’ve run into a problem in Koha. You’ve sent us a detailed ticket with screenshots, examples, and a desperate plea for a speedy resolution. The Support team has told you that you’ve encountered a known bug (or maybe you’ve discovered a new one!), and sends you a link to a site called Bugzilla. What the heck are you supposed to do with that? Why can’t ByWater fix your problem right now?
Koha is an open-source product. That means that a dedicated group of librarians and developers around the world works collaboratively and transparently to patch bugs, create new features and enhancements, and manage the development process; all to make Koha available for free to anyone.
The Koha community produces two major releases per year, in May and November. Every month between the May and November releases, the Koha community produces a smaller release called a “point release” (at ByWater we sometimes call these PS updates – PS is for ‘post script’), containing bugfixes and security updates. Generally, enhancements and new features are reserved for the major releases.
When our partners are upgraded to the newest major release of Koha, their workflows may uncover a bug, or a missed case in the new features. And that’s good! Identifying problems is the first step to fixing them.
After a bug is identified and filed, the Koha community gets to work on patching it. A developer submits a patch to be tested by someone else in the community. After the patch passes testing and Quality Assurance, the Release Manager pushes the new code to the main version of Koha, ie, the next major release. At that point, the patch can be considered for backport to previous versions (in other words, to the version you’re using).
You can read more about the development process on the Koha Wiki.
That’s great, but I can’t make heads or tails of this link that you sent me, and I still don’t know when my problem will be fixed.
There are a lot of words and confusing codespeak on Bugzilla, but when it comes to bug fixes, there’s really just one place you need to look: Version(s) released in.
If there is no version number next to Version(s) released in, that means the community is still working on patching and testing the code that will fix the bug.
In the example below, the bug has been patched, tested, passed QA, pushed to 24.11, and backported to 24.05.06.
So, what version of Koha do you use? The version number is conveniently located on the Koha home screen in the bottom right corner.
Blast! You’re using version 24.05.05, so this bug still exists for you. When will this problem be fixed in your Koha? It’s time to check the calendar!
Our partner libraries receive their point update during the fourth full week of each month. Check our Scheduled Maintenance page to see our upgrade calendar. You will not receive a News item on your staff client like you do for major releases; these updates take place quietly in the background, and the version number will change automatically when your Koha is updated.
If you want to know the specific date of your next point update, please send us a ticket.