The Atlantic City Library is an Innovative Interface user. Not having OpenBiblio, I downloaded the code and could only examine the code not use it.
I have looked at the Drupal code (
drupal.org/project/millennium) for Millennium and used it. I found this is be "interesting" but in my humble opinion not a production level implementation.
The true integration of a content management system like Joomla, Plone or Drupal would take a major effort. I know from just trying to bring together a few people to start developing such a beast. Innovative Interface "Encore" borders on such a solution and I would not be surprised to see Innovative eventually market this product as a library Internet portal for everything (webpage, database access and PAC). The amusing thing about Encore is that it appears to be built largely on Open Source software. Even the Encore support forum is using Vanilla Forum (
vanillaforums.org/) for its users support.
I am currently working with people in Europe with hopes of a group of extensions/plugins to integrate Joomla CMS with a PAC. We have a Beta version of a Joomla CMS / Millennium Authentication Plugin but it is not ready for the real world. The plan is to first have such a plugin then develop an extension similar to Joomla Book Library extension that would act as a sudo-PAC.
There are several big problems with this project. If you want the plugin to work with the major Patron API's, there must be several Authentication plugins because of the different proprietary Patron API's. Once you have these written, you have the problem of just performance with queries to the ILS system (The PAC). Consider that a Joomla PAC would have to pass a PAC search from the php layer to Z39.50 server, ILS processes the query, passes the results back to Z39.50 server, then the Joomla (php) has to parse the data and paint the screen. This is a lot of processing and hand shaking meaning it could be very slow and very ugly! Also, you have the problem of most of these ILS systems being proprietary so a Joomla CMS Extension would have to be fairly customizable to work with the variations in each ILS.
Bob Rynkiewicz
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