[Koha-devel] Managing item type images

[Owen Leonard]

Hi everyone,

Pierrick just committed some work on item type image management in HEAD,
and his comment in the CVS log got me thinking:

"new: function were added in C4::Koha to manage itemtype image location
(local/remote). Warning: you must copy or symlink the itemtypeimg directory
from the opac template into the intranet template."

Copying or symlinking sounds like too much to have to do during an
installation, so I was wondering how better to handle the item type images.
Joshua made what I think is a good suggestion, to put the itemtypeimg
directory inside the koha-tmpl directory. Then we create a directory for
each template:

/koha-tmpl/itemtypeimg/css
/koha-tmpl/itemtypeimg/npl

We talked about using a system preference to specify the file extension, to
create item type images like this:

<img src="/koha-tmpl/itemtypeimg/<!-- TMPL_VAR NAME="template" -->/TMPL_VAR
NAME="itemtype" -->.<!--TMPL_VAR NAME="extension" -->

...where 'extension' is '.gif,' '.png,' etc.  But the current system does a
directory listing of everything in itemtypeimg, so that's not necessary.

I'm wondering if instead of making the item type images template-dependent
(css,npl,whatever) like I suggested above, we should have them be independent, 
so that libraries
could choose an icon set independently of their current template.  The
management screen on itemtypes.pl could have a drop-down list of item type
sets found in /itemtypeimg/.  That would give us the freedom in the future
to add original sets of item type images that other libraries or developers
might create.

What does everyone think?  Would there be any problems associated with
moving itemtypeimge into /koha-tmpl ?

  -- Owen

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Nelsonville Public Library
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