Given that I’ve been poking through the Evergreen source code in recent days and having a look at some OPACs that are using it, I figured that I’d see what the Koha OPAC looked like. Being a bit clumsy, I mistyped my search string and managed to get an unfriendly error screen in Koha that could be avoided with some simple input checking. By comparison, Evergreen seems to do a better job at checking for user stupidity. Here are some screenshots, below the cut (click on images for a larger view).
The Koha website provides a link to the Athens, Ohio Public Library’s OPAC, to be viewed as a demo. I put in my search string, but accidentally appended “\” to the end of it:
Koha kept the trailing “\” in its search string, which messed up the regular expression. The result was an unfriendly and unhelpful error page:
Evergreen does a better job. The same person searching for “orwell\”…
…will turn up results that have something to do with “orwell”.
[...] 13, 2008 by thebookpile After describing the bug I found in Koha in my last post, I subscribed to their Bugzilla tracker and submitted the issue (now Bug 2604). It received [...]
I know you’ve already gotten some feedback via Bugzilla, but keep in mind: the Athens County Public Library is still running an older (and unofficial) version of Koha–it’s about two years old now. But we’ll make sure it gets taken care of in 3.0.
Owen: Yeah, it sounds as if the git repository already contains a fix for this (or, at the very least, the error is much less severe). Either way, the response time on my Buzilla report was quick, which is great. Kudos to Koha.