There are lot of good changes coming in Koha 3.4.0, which will be released tomorrow. Check out the current draft of the release notes. But this release of Koha includes some major architectural changes, and although the upgrade process is simple, it definitely pays to read the instructions first.
In particular, there are two upgrade steps that should not be missed:
Install Template::Toolkit
Koha 3.4.0 uses the Template::Toolkit Perl module instead of HTML::Template::Pro for the OPAC and staff interface templates. Template::Toolkit must be installed before trying to run the web updater, as the web installer itself now uses TT. If you run Koha on Debian or Ubuntu, run apt-get install libtemplate-perl. On other Linux and Unix platforms, install the packaged version of TT if available; if a packaged version isn’t available, run cpan Template.
Note that if you’re following the instructions, running ./koha_perl_deps.pl -u -m will catch the TT dependency requirement. Just don’t forget to actually install it.
Run scripts to update your bib records
Koha 3.4.0 will no longer store copies of the item record data as MARC fields in the bibliographic records. This resolves a long-standing performance issue where changing an item record (even just to change its status when it is checked out) required that Koha update the bibliographic record as well. However, this means that during upgrade it is necessary to touch all of the bib records in order to remove the item tags. To do this, run the following steps:
misc/maintenance/remove_items_from_biblioitems.pl --run misc/migration_tools/rebuild_zebra.pl -b -r
This can take several hours on a large database, so plan accordingly.
Reading (upgrade instructions) is fundamental! by Galen Charlton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.