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Release of Koha 25.05
18 Jun 2025, 2:56 PMAlex Buckley and Aleisha Amohia, Catalyst Rōpū kohinga developers, have highlighted 10 enhancements available in Koha 25.05.
Catalyst is delighted to join the Koha community in celebrating the release of Koha 25.05. This release contains five new features, 186 enhancements and 481 bug fixes.
Every six months, the Koha community does a major release. The Koha community released Koha 25.05 at the end of April 2025. Major releases are when most new features and enhancements are added to Koha and made available to libraries and organisations that use Koha to manage their collection. In this blog post, Alex Buckley and Aleisha Amohia, Catalyst Rōpū kohinga developers, highlight 10 enhancements available in Koha 25.05.
What's new in Koha 25.05?
To ensure Koha remains secure, scalable, and flexible to sustain any collection type, a release focus was on strengthening the Koha architecture. Koha 25.05 comes with enhanced visibility of database problems and increased detail modifications to patron and catalogue records in the log viewer tool.
To learn more about the entire release, check out the full Koha 25.05 release notes.
Changes to Notices
Your Koha users can now set up their preferences for updates on their account expiry. For instance, if they'd prefer email, text, or to opt out. If you'd rather set a category level, you can change this by setting the system preference in the MembershipExpiryDaysNotice system preference.
Screenshot of a patron’s messaging preferences showing the option to configure the patron account expiry notice.
Librarians can now also control which patron categories must receive the account expiry notice and can't opt out, from the staff interface.
Screenshot showing the option to enforce patron account expiry notice by category.
OPAC enhancements
- Smoother registration experience: When users self-register for Koha, if they've put themselves in the wrong age bracket, Koha automatically alerts them.
- Easier password entry: Users can now toggle the visibility of their password when logging in. Perfect for checking if you've accidentally hit capslock.
- Improved accessibility: Koha adds headings where they are missing or changes the heading levels in cases where they are incorrect.
Screenshot showing the password visibility toggle on the OPAC login.
Improvements to patron admin
- Sign-up notifications: Staff are now notified of new patrons and can be prompted to check their details or send a welcome email. Note: This depends on the PatronSelfRegistrationAlert system preference to be set.
- Easier sign-ups: Impossible dates of birth can no longer be submitted, such as 1850. Making it easier to select the correct date of birth when registering.
Screenshot of the Koha staff interface showing the self registration alert.
Simpler troubleshooting
You can now identify database structure problems at a glance. Simply ask your Koha support vendor to run the misc/maintenance/audit_database.pl script, and view the results in the 'About Koha’ page on the Koha staff client.
The script can also be set up to run automatically daily, providing constant access to useful information to help you speed up any potential troubleshooting."
Screenshot of the Database audit tab where results are shown.
Tool updates
- Bulk user updates: Koha superlibrarian users can now add or remove the protected status to patrons en masse using the batch patron modification tool. This is a handy way to protect patrons from accidentally being deleted.
- Easier insights to changes: The Log Viewer tool now provides more information to library staff tracking changes to patrons' accounts, items, and catalogue records over time. It may be hidden by default, but can be easily toggled to show using the Columns setting.
Screenshot from a batch patron modification showing some of the options that can be set, including the new Protected option.
Sponsorship contributions
Thanks to the sponsorship from some of our libraries, we are pleased to share a list of fixes and enhancements that made it into Koha 25.05.
Sponsorship also makes it possible to support us to maintain older Koha versions. For this cycle, we maintained the Koha 24.05 release, which involved backporting changes and keeping the version stable and secure.
Make authorities 'see from' searches more specific: sponsored by Education Services Australia SCIS.
OpacTrustedCheckout self-checkout modal not checking out valid barcode: sponsored by Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
OpacTrustedCheckout module does not show due date: sponsored by Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
Patron password hash can be fetched using report dictionary: sponsored by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
Issues on serial collection page sort from old to new now: sponsored by Pymble Ladies' College.
Add ability to mark a suggestion as 'available' from the suggestions management page: sponsored by Pymble Ladies' College.
Add publisher/distributor number (MARC21 028$a) to standard identifier search index: sponsored by Education Services Australia SCIS.
Use Koha.Preference in OPAC reading record.
Make overdue_notices.pl quiet if there are no libraries with active overdue rules.
If you’re interested in sponsoring any improvements to Koha or sharing your ideas, we’re happy to chat.
Koha support
If you have any questions about the latest Koha release or would like support with your Koha, contact us.
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