After Kelly's post I told myself that it would be cool to share our project with you and what's next. Alex began to develop the opac module. Now, this developpment will evolve differently from september with a whole team (commiters, testers, librarians, …), roadmap and users. We have a lot of ideas, work to be done, and things to do … and it's great!
You can see things in action on this page: http://drupac.biblibre.com (we would like to propose something else soon to demonstrate our work). If you want to go further, have a look to the documentation. We chose to built this module on a Drupal 7 version. (After, we would like to provide an entire distribution for librarians called "Drupac". More information soon :)
Today, it is a sandbox so we need review (to pass in full project) and I am sure you can help us :) (tests, feedbacks, shares with other people and why not code) Do not forget it is a work in progress, we are open to feedbacks so please, do not hesitate!
Hope you'll like it!
Claire.
Références:
- Opac sandbox http://drupal.org/sandbox/AlexArnaud/1570572
- Link for review https://drupal.org/node/1570804
- Documentation (wip) http://drupac.biblibre.com/drupal-opac
- Démo (wip): http://drupac.biblibre.com
A little bit more about me: I work at BibLibre in Marseille, France. I have a technical background. We provide services around open source software (koha mostly and Drupal) for libraries. I didn't have the luck to coordinate a software team with Drupal to this daybut I follow the drupal community for some years (have a look to “eClaire” profile) :)
Comments
Claire, That's great! Have
Claire,
That's great! Have you guys talked at all with people working on the XC project: http://drupal.org/project/xc
I like their modular approach and they seem to already have done a lot of work, albeit on D6.
In my project I'm focusing on writing as little new code as possible--which is actually harder and slower for me since I'm a hacker.
But I'm slowly discovering that I can do a lot of what I need to do with Rules, WSClient (which exposes web services as Rules actions http://drupal.org/project/wsclient), Commerce, Views, Features et, al. Anyone who wants to create an OPAC distribution should exhaust all the contrib possibilities.
Kelly
About XC and contributions
We tried to contact XC guys by mail some months ago without result. We found their work really interesting and proposed help for porting to D7 without answer.
We share the same view on first building with available modules. We wanted to focus on current stable drupal release in order to package what is 'featurable'. Final goal is to provide libraries with a distribution release.
An XC guy is here
Hi Claire,
Could you please resend your email either to me or to my collegues (http://www.extensiblecatalog.org/about)? I am sorry, that we did not give you feedback, I am sure this would be a better turn ;-)
Keep me in the loop, too,
Keep me in the loop, too, please. I think this is an exciting time for Drupal and libraries.
sure
sure
Some news
=> Opac is now a full project ! http://drupal.org/project/opac
The documentation is updated: http://drupal.org/node/1677586
Great!
Hey, looks very cool and interesting, nice to have this option for Drupal.
I did see an error in the demo, so thought should report it
On the main page, just went to the demo:
http://drupac.biblibre.com/
Notice: Undefined index: access in _menu_link_translate() (line 927 of /home/drupal/www/drupac/includes/menu.inc).Notice: Undefined index: access in _menu_tree_check_access() (line 1510 of /home/drupal/www/drupac/includes/menu.inc).
Kudos!
Drupal StackExchange
The demo is not at the moment
The demo is not at the moment very... hm... viewable, I should put a "maintenance flag".
Collaboration
Hi Clarie,
I guess we can move forward to move some subprojects to external projects. I see that you also created a module for cover images based on ISBN. We have also a similar module. We have modules for other library related APIs such as for OCLC's Dewey.info and XISSN. Using common API calls both of the projects (and other projects as well) can enjoy the efforts.
opac cover and externalisation
Big ++ to externalize submodules as cover and enhanced content. Today, we have a cover module really basic that does not satisfy us. We plan to remove it from opac and do or use and other better one. We could contribute to your sandbox or full project with pleasure.
I would be glad to share about "common API" maybe by mail or on irc (We are on freenode all the -french- day : clrh).
Our logic is to combine and contribute to existing modules (we propose a patch to mkdru yesterday for example). We will make opac submodules only for the "library specific" things (catalog management as reserves, harvest, etc.) that cannot exist alone.
questions from XC
Peter from XC made me aware of this thread (and I am also from XC but not a developer). I have a question. I am sorry if we didn't respond to prior emails. I know we had a brief interaction regarding getting holdings data extracted from the bib records for Koha back in May. Againg, sorry if we missed something else.
I see that there is a call for ILS connector developers. We are using NCIP in the XC enviorenment, and already have several connectors developed. How far along is the connector work, and did you consider using a standard such as NCIP for these ILS type functions, patron lookup, location, availability, etc.
We considered of course to
We considered of course to use NCIP and to develop ncip webservices on top of Koha. Ncip use cases does not provide enought functionnal cases in our point of view. So we did a Koha connector (called Ilsdi, not a good idea, we will change it) which calls what exists in ilsdi in koha and calls other rest services build on top of Koha. If someone wants to connect another ILS, the connector can be written: it can calls ilsdi or ncip or direct database connection or a mix of things or whatever you want.
Specifications are here: http://drupal.org/node/1677586 > http://drupal.org/node/1781146
It was important for us to build something in a Drupal module (we will document how to build an external independant module). I saw you connectors are written in Java and it is not our technical choice.
Randall, do I answer to your question ?
NCIP Connectors
I facilitate a group of open source developers from several institutions (OCLC, a large consortium in Illinois called CARLI, Lehigh U, NC State) that are trying to move the NCIP Protocol forward. I represent us on the NCIP Advisory board. We have successfully lobbied for many changes that are needed in the standard. Some of us care about resource sharing and others about discovery. The group is a great group and we try to meet the needs of real developers doing real things. We would like to make the toolkit a standard, and have made many changes to make it appealing to vendors too. It is a slow road, but one we think is worth it, vs. continuing to build one off connectors. If anyone is interested in participating or finding out more, please let me know. We meet every two weeks and new voices are welcome.
Everyone should check out the
Everyone should check out the WSClient project:
http://drupal.org/project/wsclient
It's a generic way to describe an external web service to Drupal 7. It currently supports SOAP and REST and could be extended for other things (even non-HTTP methods). For SOAP services, if you can specify a WSDL the client just builds itself. Otherwise you can describe the service via the UI and export it (using Features or manually). I'm using it with Rules and Scheduled Jobs to harvest data from a few web services.