There are major bugs with Koha's handling of patron information that need to be addressed immediately. I went through Bugzilla today and have organized them as follows below.
I'd estimate that a programmer who reads through all of these reports carefully, understands how they are related, can come up with a plan and solve them _all_ (not just patch one or two), in about 1-2 days tops.
With 3.0, SAN-OP moved from having simple categories of patrons, to having patron 'types' (which are hardcoded), and patron categories (which are configurable).
The core blocker issues related to types/categories have to do with a few related bugs:
Bug 281: Updating a child to an adult registration is diabolical Its now less diabolical since 1699 is fixed
Bug 1686: Moremember can't tell if a patron is a child
Bug 1699: Cannot change existing patron's borrower type
To clarify, there needs to be a simple way to change the patron 'type' (not category, that already exists), and the drop-down to update from Child → Adult needs a variable to determine if the patron is a Child in the first place (it is disabled otherwise).
1691: Editing patron record results in date of birth error
This bug report explains the issue pretty well, to test it you will
have to start with empty DOB info in your database.
An additional issue I discovered is that if you edit a patron account
that has a date filled, and you remove the DOB, and save it, it saves as a
bogus date of '00/02/0'.
In both of these cases, the DOB info should be a required field on edit,
the server-side warn should always work when that field is empty (not just
the first time), and we shouldn't ever have bogus date info being filled in.
The error validation seems to work sometimes, and not others, for that, see:
Bug 1631: Alternate contact option gone, confused with Address
The issue here is that with version 3.0, SAN-OP re-appropriated and/or changed
fields in the borrowers table that were used to store an 'alternate contact',
or a person to contact (perhaps better named 'emergency contact'). The fields
are now used to store 'alternate contact info', which is just an alternative
address. Obviously both are necessary in the Koha community, and the system
needs to be able to handle both of these situations.
1692: Need server-side validation of mandatory patron entry fields
Bug 1164: Registration Branch not auto-filled when creating child account
Bug 1517: C4::Members AddMember and ModMember should pass back failure codes
Also, Patron entry pages ignore age of the patron when it conflicts with
their category:
Bug 1693: Patron entry age check not working
And remove the hardcoded flags in memberentry.pl, as specified in:
Bug 1654: Patron flag terms hardcoded in memberentry.pl
Bug 1599: Pre-fill patron expiration date in patron entry form
Bug 1014: moremember.pl should show error message if borrowernumber was not found
Koha throws a 500 error if the borrowernumber isn't found, at a link such as
/cgi-bin/koha/members/moremember.pl?borrowernumber=1617
This needs to be resolved to show a warning 'Patron number not found'
Bug 1666: Can't hide empty select dropdowns in patron entry form
Bug 612: Renewal failure gives no feedback – Kyle fixed this in dev_week but I couldn't find the patch