Some basic customisation

Now, that I have Koha up and running, I would like to do some basic customisation.

I went into the Administration tools as shown in the final steps of the Ubuntu instructions and created my home library (Martinville Public). Now I wanted to see what else I could do, so it was time for some good old discovery through exploration. I went into the settings to see what I could do. I decided, since there were so many settings, that I would focus on OPAC customisation. I found the settings by searching the Global system preferences for the world OPAC. I changed a number of the settings to what I preferred, and this was relatively easy, each setting had a good description, any setting which needed each clarification could be looked up in the manual, and additional information and examples were available.

Koha Administration settings

A few settings in the OPAC configuration which I wished to change were a bit harder. They required me to brush up on my HTML skills. I was trying to get the image to scale to 100% of the page, and couldn't figure out how to do it. I had visited Google, and W3C Schools, but couldn't find the right way, so I asked my husband, and he said that all I needed to do was to add a style element to my <img> tag to create

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/0YQEJWX.png" style="width:100%;" alt="Martinville Library Banner" />

This worked very well, and I now had a banner which resized based upon the width of the widow.

I also edited the HTML for the footer to add my name

<p style="text-align:center;">&copy; Karla Martin</p>

as well as the Important links on the side, which I added a few links back to my public library, Hutt City, as fillers.

<ul style="list-style-type:none;">

   <li><a href="http://epukapuka.lib.overdrive.com/8532C2E5-CC21-4BB7-BA0C-2F42FF568DE1/10/50/en/Default.htm">Ebooks</a></li>

   <li><a href="http://library.huttcity.govt.nz/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/MSGTRN/OPAC/CONTACT">Contact us</a></li>

   <li><a href="http://library.huttcity.govt.nz/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/MSGTRN/OPAC/LOCATIONS">Locations & Hours</a></li>

</ul>

I used my existing knowledge of HTML to complete these tasks, referring to W3C Schools to find out how to remove bullet points from an unordered list.

Changed Koha Settings

My Customised Catalogue

What I learnt - I had a good existing knowledge of HTML which allowed me to set a lot of these settings rather easily. I was surprised to realise how easy I found it to change the settings. I think my previous knowledge of HTML helped a little, but this was greatly helped by the good manual and descriptions included with all the settings. I also learnt the knowledge of other people can sometimes trump Google searching, as when I couldn't find a way to get a full width header.