[Isis-users] updates available for ABCD 1.3t

[De Smet Egbert]

dear colleagues,

I have updated the downloads page (http://abcd.netcat.be/files) with some minor updates of version 1.3t.
These updates relate mostly to the now working reservation-scripts of the standard loans module (while 'renewal' still needs some final polishing) and some bugs-removal, e.g. the one affecting validation of edited records, and some added scripts for loanobjects and copies creation in the main Utilities menu. All scripts, except the new utilities, are based on the ones of the ABCD-wiki website (http://www.abcdwiki.net).
As ABCD is now more than ever a hugely complicated package, due to being a flexible general WWW-based information manager, still (minor) things can go wrong, so please keep giving feedback. Sorry for using some of you as guinea-pigs testers but we don't have all the resources ourselves to fully test every single package and feature, while we believe errors will be rather minor and not affecting the basic operations. Making sure you have backups available is always a good practice !
For the French version still many updates, esp. in the on-screen messages, are missing but people are working on this. System managers can still derive correct/full versions for their language by deriving it from the '00'-language.

If you have ABCD v1.3t already installed, you could suffice by downloading only the Central archive as this contains all scripts without affecting your databases and config-files (except config.php in central).
If you want to update older ABCD-installations, the recommended method is :
- download the full packages for either Windows, Linux 32-bits or Linux-64 bits
- make exports to ISO-files of your specific local databases (e.g. your MARC-catalog, copies-, loanobjects- and users-databases)
- install the package
- import the ISO-files into the existing corresponding databases (there is a new utility in the main utilities menu for this which is much faster without database size-limits by by-passing the http-protocol).
By doing so you ensure that you have the new database-structures of v1.3t (in some cases these are different from previous to 1.2t versions) but still keep your local data.

For the Linux versions : these are also updated but unfortunately we still need to ask for some patience for an update on the basic wxis executable to make it fully compatible with newer (as from 2013) versions of Linux, so some quirks might still appear. A team is working on this so an update is in the pipelines.
After the renewal-functions are fully ready we will resume working on version 2.0 (e.g. Digital Library and Unicode : most is working but we need new versions of the wxis executables again) and update the manual on Central.

Egbert de Smet
Universiteit