I want to share a work with you. I knew we can now switch SearchEngine syspref to ElasticSearch in Koha community version, but I didn’t know a lot more. I explored with some BibLibre guys what we can really do, if we can propose this feature to our users. It seems there is some work to do but it would be great to have a more solid version for 18.05 if we test and fix more things, a version for early adopters who want to try it in production.
In a BibLibre point of view, we could imagine 2 customers with their Koha in a testing environment and a 18.05 version. People could test the search engine with their database and write bugzilla issues to improve the implementation. Then, we would be able to deploy ElasticSearch in 18.11 in the next major update. We are planning to fix bugs and enhance actual work for the next months. But this work cannot be done only with some developpers in the community. If you want it, you will have to work for it 😉
I began a document where I list the gap to this version, it is a work in progress. I integrated the items identified by Nick (kidclamp) in the wiki page (Elastisearch_status). Thanks. I could have put everything in bugzilla or wiki but it wasn’t ideal to me at this time. Depending your feedback I can make it better.
You will find a tab called “Way to 18.05”: the idea is to list features missing or incomplete to have a 18.05 clean with no big error and minimal service to search authorities, biblio, making configuration. You can add your questions in the tab “Questions” or send a mail on koha-devel, it could be used as a faq maybe. I began to list the advantages for ElasticSearch in Koha I see in the tab “Pros”. Feel free to request the access to edit then – please – add items that could make move forward.
