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There are a couple of things I am doing to get my head around themes. The “Drupal 6 Themes” by Ric Shreves is a great introduction. I have installed Firebug on firefox and the drupal devel module on drupal to help with theme development. I am using Crimson Editor as my editing tool on Vista. It has a nice ftp component for remote editing.

Check out this devel module tutorial

Drupal camp at Darien Library was a wonderful experience and I took away some great ideas. There are a couple of modules that I have not yet installed and the conference has prompted me to get my act together. To start am going to install CCK and Views. John Blyberg gave a great talk about how to manage modules, I am going to attempt to follow his advice. The first module to install is the CCK (Content Creation Kit). I have created a directory called dl_modules (dl = downloaded) under the modules directory. This is where I am locating all my downloaded modules. I ftp’d the module to this directory and the uncompressed it. I logged into drupal as the adminstrator and ran update.php and everything installed. I repeated the process for the views module and again no errors.

Today I fixed a bug on the fines piece of the code. It was throwing an error when the patron had zero fines. This has been corrected. I have seen some talk on the Drupal library listserver about getting patron data onto Drupal from a Sirsi system, so here is a picture of my patron account (I have hidden my library card number). This data is taken from Sirsi/Dynix Unicorn system 3.1.2.5 in realtime.

Today I am looking at item types. Things such as books, magazines etc… and having the ability to search on these types. John has abstracted these out in the locum.ini file and you are going to have to go in and make some changes. Below is what I did. I have commented out John’s code because the III system has a different way of identifying items. I have written another webservice call item_type.pl and this takes a cat_key and returns the item type. I have followed John’s lead and grouped the item types with search descriptors below in the next section. This means when I do a search for book I am really searching item types books, largeprint and  book boards. You get the idea.

Part of the locum.ini file

; This is where you provide a list of key-to-value pairs for material codes so,
; for insteance, if the material code for books is “a”, you would do:
; a = “Books”
; Do one-per-line.  Codes ARE case sensitive.
[formats]
;1                                                      = “Book”
;2                                                      = “Reference”
;3                                                      = “Magazine”
;4                                                      = “VHS”
;5                                                      = “Book on Tape”
;6                                                      = “CD”
;9                                                      = “CDROM”
;a                                                      = “Express Book”
;b                                                      = “Book on CD”
;c                                                      = “Leappad Game”
;d                                                      = “DVD”
;g                                                      = “Book in a Bag”
;h                                                      = “Computer Equipment”
;k                                                      = “Read-along Tape”
;m                                                      = “Playaway”
;n                                                      = “Newspaper”
;x                                                      = “Audio Download”

; This is where you provide a list of key to value pairs for material codes
; I have cumstomized this for our Sirsi/Dynix system
BOOK                                                    = “Book”
BK_ON_CD                                                = “Book on CD”
BK_ON_TAPE                                              = “Book on Tape”
BLDG_PLANS                                              = “Building Plan”
BOARD_BOOK                                              = “Board Book”
DVD_EDUCAT                                              = “DVD Education”
DVD_MOVIE                                               = “DVD Movie”
DVD_RMOVIE                                              = “DVD R Rated Movie”
EQUIP-21DY                                              = “21 Day Equipment”
EXPRESS                                                 = “Express Book”
ILL                                                     = “Interlibrary Loan”
LARGEPRINT                                              = “Large Print”
MAGAZINE                                                = “Magazine”
MEDIA_KIT                                               = “Media Kit”
MUSIC_CD                                                = “Music CD”
MUSIC_CASS                                              = “Music Cassette”
PTC                                                     = “Parent Teacher Kit”
PUZZL_GAME                                              = “Puzzle Games”
SCORE                                                   = “Score”
SOFTWARE                                                = “Software”
VGAME_7DAY                                              = “Video Games 7 days”
VERT_FILE                                               = “Vertical File”
VIDEO_GAME                                              = “Video Game”
VID_EDUCAT                                              = “Video Education”
VID_MOVIE                                               = “Video Movie”
VID_RMOVIE                                              = “Video R Movie”

; This section is used when searching by material types.  Often there is more than
; one material code for the same type of material.  Locum uses these options to
; scope a search for, say “books” to material code a, b, and c if a, b, and c
; are print/books
; in that case, the option would be, books = “a, b, c”
[format_groups]
;everything                                     = “all”
;books                                          = “1, 2, a, g”
;movies                                                 = “4, d”
;music                                          = “6″
;audiobooks                                     = “5, b, k, m”
;periodicals                            = “3, n”
;software                                       = “9, c”
;electronics                            = “e”
everything                                      = “all”
books                                           = “BOOK, BOARD_BOOK, EXPRESS, LARGEPRINT”
movies                                          = “DVD_EDUCAT, DVD_MOVIE, DVD_RMOVIE, VID_MOVIE, VID_RMOVIE, VID_EDUCAT”
music                                           = “MUSIC_CD, MUSIC_CASS, SCORE”
audiobooks                                      = “BK_ON_CD, BK_ON_TAPE”
periodicals                                     = “MAGAZINE”
software                                        = “SOFTWARE, VIDEO_GAME”

Today Tim and I have been trying to figure out why the Reviews Section was not working. The gotcha is in the insurge.ini file. There were two variables group_id and group_key. The default values were larger than the database fields caused truncation to occur.  We when in and set our own values and then went back into the insurge tables and hand edited the variables. We used ACPLID and ACPLKEY, you can pick something that works for you.

The next little hurdle was the Tags and the Save Search features. These needed to be set so that they only displayed on selected pages. We were having them displayed after each general search and at that point there was not bnum association.  After this was corrected we were able to save searches and tags.

I have been looking at trying to figure out how to add pickup locations to my code. The solution ended up being pretty easy. Just activate the profile.module. Don’t worry if you have already gotten this far you had to have activated it. Now take a look at this video

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I have a little code to write to extract the variable but that should be transparent to you.

Today’s bug fix is writing another webservice to handle the conversion between item numbers and catkey. It is called catkeys.pl. Since the data is searchable on catkey numbers all objects that just have the item number need to be converted. This fixes the problem on the MY Holds and  My Checkouts. These links now work and when clicked and will display the full record. The next peice of code I am working to get functioning is reviews section.

Today I am working on the code for hold and copy counts. I needed to write a new webservice called item_keys.pl. It basically takes the catkey and returns all the item keys. I then go count those items that are available and on hold. You can see the results.

Sirsi Unicorn has a interesting feature where they give an approximation of your fines. I am sure that there is a very good reason for this but it has caused me some problems. Today I have coded around this feature and in the My Account you can how see how many items you have checked out and your actual fines. One of the features that is still not working for me is the ability to write a review and have that associated a book. This is probably what I am going to work on next.