Koha administrative users have the power to completely customise their public catalogue (OPAC). Koha provides a range of functionality to style the OPAC’s theme so it can align with your organisational branding. Here are some ways you can customise your Koha catalogue. After redesigning your OPAC, you may be interested in increasing clicks to your Koha or adding content pages to Koha.
This blog post was updated in 2025.
11 ways you can add custom content on your homepage
The OPAC is divided into sections that can hold custom content or be edited.
In Koha 21.05 and earlier, the tools to edit these sections can all be found in the staff interface, under ‘Tools’ > ‘News’.
In Koha 21.11 and above, the tools to edit these sections can still be found in the staff interface, however, most sections have been separated to ‘Tools’ > ‘HTML customisations’. You may also use the tools ‘Tools’ > ‘News’ and ‘Tools’ > ‘Quote editor’.
To access these tools, your Koha account will need the tools.edit_additional_contents permission.
The ‘HTML customisations’ and ‘News’ tools provide a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor so tables and images can be inserted or text can be easily formatted. There is also a standard text editor option for those more comfortable with writing HTML.
1. The header
One of the regions available for HTML customisation is opacheader. The header appears between the top navigation bar (where the Cart and Lists menu live) and the catalogue search bar. This section is typically used to show a company banner or logo. Any opacheader customisations will show across the whole OPAC, not just the homepage.
2. Custom search
OpacCustomSearch is the region to work with if your organisation would like to make changes to the catalogue search bar. These changes will be applied to every page on the OPAC where the catalogue search bar shows not just the homepage. We add HTML customisations in OpacCustomSearch to change how users may conduct searches, such as implementing a search tab for EBSCO’s Discovery Service.
3. Navigation
Three different sections can be treated as navigation menus:
- OpacNav
- OpacNavBottom
- OpacNavRight.
OpacNav and OpacNavBottom make up the left sidebar of the homepage. These sections are typically used to link to other useful websites and resources. You may use these sections to link instructional user guides or information about other services provided by the organisation.
OpacNavRight sits on the right sidebar of the homepage. This is another area to supply helpful links or display useful information such as opening hours or a hot tip for getting the most out of the OPAC.
4. The main user block
OpacMainUserBlock holds the key creative content your library may use to grab the attention of users. This section can be edited in the ‘HTML customisations’ tool, and plenty of catalogues have multiple OpacMainUserBlock sections!
The OpacMainUserBlock section is used in a range of ways. Many start with a welcome message and a blurb about the organisation and what it offers. OpacMainUserBlock has also been used to showcase interesting articles, reviews, and blog posts written by staff.
Some organisations display interactive, catalogue-centred content in their OpacMainUserBlock, such as sliders. Sliders can display book covers from lists and reports made within Koha, so a library has the flexibility to include whichever records they’d like. For instance, sliders may be used to display titles recently added to the catalogue, titles by New Zealand authors, or even images of the library space.
5. The footer
The footer on all pages of the OPAC can be edited using the opaccredits region. This is a great place to include information or links that users might like to access easily at any point. The footer is often used to display opening hours, contact information, and social media links.
6. Login instructions
The OpacLoginInstructions section is useful to provide further details to users about how to access the catalogue and their account information. This section has been used to describe how to log in to the OPAC, reset a forgotten password, or access the self-checkout platform.
7. News
Koha provides an awesome feature for organisations to post news items, found under ‘Tools’ > ‘News’. News items are best used for announcements that only need to appear temporarily. For example, a news item is a good way to inform users about an upcoming event, or a scheduled site outage.
These news items can be configured to display on the staff interface, the OPAC, or both. They can also have date settings, so they can be scheduled to publish and expire on a chosen date.
8. Quote of the day
If your library is interested in displaying quotes, enable the QuoteOfTheDay system preference. The ‘Quote editor’ tool can be used to configure quotes for Koha to display on the staff interface, OPAC, or both!
9. Reach your users in their language
Custom OPAC content that can be edited under ‘Tools’ > ‘HTML customisations’ and ‘Tools’ > ‘News’ can be uploaded in any language installed for your Koha. The languages available to view the OPAC are set using the OPACLanguages system preference.
This feature makes your Koha more accessible to your users. Your OPAC can display your welcome message in English, Spanish, Korean, and any other language you have configured.
We are proud to have supported the development of a plugin to install Australian Indigenous languages to Koha. This plugin was sponsored by the Education Services Australia Schools Catalogue Information Service (SCIS) team.
Bonus tip: Make sure you have some content set in the Default language. That way, if a user switches their OPAC language and you haven’t provided translated content, Koha shows the ‘untranslated’ Default content instead of a blank space.
10. OPAC system preferences
In addition to putting custom content in the OPAC editable regions, preferences can be set to further configure how the OPAC looks and behaves, and how users might interact with it. These global system preferences can be found in the ‘Koha administration’ module in the staff interface. There are plenty of references specifically for the OPAC, but there are a few that are commonly used and worth highlighting.
11. Colours, fonts, and other display properties
There are a few ways to control the styles applied across the OPAC. You can make changes to the way everything looks – colours, fonts, font sizes, images, backgrounds, or completely hide elements. Style properties can also be applied when an element is hovered over or clicked.
The best way to apply styles across many different elements is to link an external stylesheet in the OpacAdditionalStylesheet system preference. It makes it easier to modify things again as all of the applied changes are in one place.
If you can’t link to an external stylesheet, the OpacUserCSS system preference can be used for style fixes.
There is also an OpacUserJS system preference that can be used to apply JavaScript to the OPAC. JavaScript is useful for a huge range of things – we often use OpacUserJS to add new HTML elements to the pages such as dropdown menus, buttons, and links. We also use JavaScript to hide and show elements that patrons shouldn’t see or have access to and to animate features such as sliders.
Other system preferences
Create a summary for users
- OPACUserSummary – Show a summary of checkouts, overdue, holds and charges on the OPAC homepage.
- OPACMySummaryHTML – Add a column in the tables on the 'My summary' and 'My checkout history' pages for logged in OPAC users.
Choose what is hidden in OPAC and search pages
- OPACHiddenItems – Define rules to hide items from OPAC.
- OPACHiddenItemsExceptions – Enable specified user categories to see otherwise hidden items.
- OPACAdvSearchOptions – Hide options from the OPAC advanced search page.
- OPACSuggestionsUnwantedFields – Hide fields from the OPAC suggestion page.
- hidelostitems – Hide lost items from search and detail pages.
Configure how you highlight words and items
- HighlightOwnItemsOnOPAC and HighlightOwnItemsOnOPAC - Move items to the front and increase the font size from the patron’s home library.
- OPACHighlightedWords – Choose if search terms are highlighted in the result and detail pages.
- NotHighlightedWords – Define stopwords that should never be highlighted.
Customise search results
- OPACNoResultsFound – Add HTML to be displayed when no results are found for an OPAC search.
Enable patrons to report problems
- OPACReportProblem – Enable users to submit problems found in the OPAC to KohaAdminEmailAddress.
If you would like assistance implementing any of these ideas for your Koha, or if you’re wondering if another idea can be done with Koha, contact Rōpū kohinga for support.
