User manual

12
Customizing Koha Software
Most serious Koha users will want to customize the software to suit their needs,
perhaps to modify the styling or appearance or to tweak a certain page to show
additional information. If you have the skills, you can even take on more serious
work, such adding new features.
It is best to share the code you create by sending patches to Koha's release manager.
Koha's license requires that we share any enhancements we make. Another reason to
share the code is that if your changes are included in upcoming releases, you don't
have to do the work of retrofitting your changes into the new version.
In this chapter, we learn how to customize Koha code. We start with an orientation,
and then use a specific example to demonstrate how to implement and share
software changes.
An orientation to customizing Koha
software
Let's first get an understanding on how to go about customizing software. We
will learn about the skills required, the organization of Koha's application folder
and its database, and the process of making the software changes using Git,
Koha's version -control system.