Goodbye learning 2017, hello learning 2018

I learned a hell of a lot last year.

1. Tech stuff

Koha

This year at MPOW we migrated our library management system to Koha and I had to simultaneously learn how Koha works and teach other people. It was a pretty crazy time, but it's been an amazing experience and I just want to keep learning more.

MOAR MaRC

An unexpected part of learning how Koha works was that I had to learn a lot more about MARC. All of our cataloguing workflows were written for Amlib, and whilst Koha's cataloguing tools are extremely flexible and pretty sophisticated, the flipside is that with great power comes great responsibility. You can create complex MARC modification rules for importing files, but to do that you have to know what to modify, how, and why. I probably have more of an appreciation of just how much information is packed into MARC records now, though my fundamental position is still that it's an outdated standard that needs to be replaced a lot faster than we all seem to be moving.

mySQL

I've been meaning to learn how to write SQL queries for years now, but somehow I always got away with not knowing how. Moving to Koha gave me the final push to learn, and it turns out it's not as complicated as I expected.

CiviCRM

It's bothered me for quite a while that we've been effectively forcing newCardigan mailing list recipients and cardiParty attendees to sign up to third party platforms to participate. In December we finally completed our migration to CiviCRM on WordPress, bringing our mailing list, events, podcasting, website management and potential fundraising and membership 'in-house' into one system managed by us. Setting this up meant having to learn how CiviCRM works, and to be honest I'm pretty impressed by it. This is the same CRM used by EFA and The Greens and it's both powerful and reasonably easy to set up.

WordPress theme development

I didn't really want to move the newCardigan website to WordPress - everyone had learned how to use Ghost and I find it much easier to manage. Unfortunately, moving to CiviCRM required that we use one of the big three PHP-based platforms: WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal. Setting up a Drupal site seemed like it might be overkill, and WordPress is familiar to everyone on the newCardigan committee, so we went with that. Unfortunately that meant making our own theme in WordPress and I discovered to my surprise that the official WordPress docs are terrible. For a system that powers somewhere between 20% and 25% of the web, this was a bit of a shock, and it made me more appreciative of what the Ghost team have done with docs and guides, given how much smaller and less mature the project is. Anyway, I managed to work things out eventually and whilst I definitely wouldn't say I'm now a "WordPress theme developer" I learned how to hack something together.

CSS grid

I'd seen Jen Simmons and Rachel Andrew talking excitedly about CSS Grid on Twitter over the course of 2017. I didn't quite understand why it was so exciting, but it sounded interesting, so I watch some of Andrew's Grid by example videos and spent quite a few minutes staring at the screen say "wow". grid suddenly makes everything so much easier. A few lines and you can make a responsive, sensible and more interesting site, and spend time making things interesting and pretty instead of spending time just making sure it all lines up properly. With grid and flex, even n00bs like me should be able to quickly knock up something that looks sensible in any modern browser on any screen.

Using package.json and npm install for nodejs

Part of the move from Ghost to WordPress was exporting our old website posts from the Ghost site and importing them into WordPress. The Ghost team created a great tool for moving from WordPress to Ghost, but I couldn't find anything that worked moving in the other direction. So I wrote a nodejs script to do the job. When I was looking at how to make it simple to use with any filename, I finally realised why package.json is useful, and how npm install and npm start work.. I'll definitely be using all three again.

Docker

I'm not sure I'll ever really understand Docker, but I learned a lot more this year. As part of some server housekeeping, I moved all my projects (bots, meteor apps, etc) to Docker. This makes them all a lot easier to maintain and, if necessary, move again in future.

When there's a problem with something you've installed on a web server, it's probably a permissions error.

I learned t