Orientation and To-Do List for the Project Manager

It took my technical folks just a few hours to successfully install VuFind. Now what should you, the project manager, do? I am starting this page to help project managers form their initial “to-do” roadmap/list. Some project managers will have more tech. background, some less. I'm going for a middle-of-the-pack approach. I plan to keep working on this, but please feel free to edit / add your items!

• If the VuFind release you installed has been around for a while, it is possible that there are known issues with it. Take a look at the JIRA issue manager to get a feel for known issues. Perhaps your development team can fix some problems and contribute code back to the community. JIRA also contains user-contributed patches that might not be universal enough for inclusion in the main code distribution but which might help solve some of your local needs.

• Keep track of your changes. This will become very important if you have to upgrade to a new version of VuFind in the future. If you are making a small number of changes, you could do something as simple as creating a Google Doc Spreadsheet to track directory, filename, date, changes made to file on that date, and a change reason. If you plan on making many complex changes, you should probably invest some time in learning about a change management package like Subversion.
• Keep local documentation – for example, a wiki is a good way to list steps like import procedures for your institution.
• Make sure everyone knows what tools to use.

• Set up your e-mail client to filter the VuFind-General and VuFind-Tech lists into a folder. There is an online search (http://sourceforge.net/search/?group_id=199442&type_of_search=mlists) available of archives, but I found having local copies to be convenient and faster.
• Get to know SOLR, which contains the data for your VuFind installation. I liked the SOLR wiki: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/FAQ
• Edit a few smarty templates to get the hang of how they work. See the user interface customization page for more details. I recommend trying small changes to \vufind\web\interface\themes\classic\Record.php such as adding a MARC field of your own.

• Decide what order you want your facets to appear in and how you want them labelled, and edit the facets.ini file as described on the customizing facets page.
• Decide whether you need to customize record display. If so, you may want to build a custom record driver or modify the templates of an existing one.
• Decide if you want to tweak the relevance ranking. See the search customization page for details on how to do this. If you like how another library's setup is working, just email them – most VuFind users are willing to share their settings.
• Clean up any functions you aren't going to use right away, for example, “text this”, by hiding them or removing them from the appropriate Smarty template. It's often better to eliminate a feature completely than to offer a feature that doesn't work the way you want or expect it to.

Q. Where can I see what's going on with SOLR/Jetty/PHP? 

A. You can see what searches are being sent to SOLR in several ways:

- Look in solr/jetty/logs and you should see a file for each day there have been searches, filled with the queries as-sent. - in web/conf/config.ini, edit the vufind config file to turn debug=true near the top. Now the queries will appear in your web browser as you search VuFind.

Q. How do I change XXXX about VuFind? 

A. Here are the functions, directories and files you'll probably work with the most:

Changing the web displays (i.e. HTML)

See web/interface/themes/[your_theme_name] – this contains the Smarty templates which are basically enhanced HTML for your web displays. For more details, see the User Interface Customization page.

Changing what data is available to each display

The web/services directory contains the PHP files behind each page in VuFind. For example, web/services/Search/Results.php (Home.php in 1.0RC1 and earlier) controls the main search-and-results page. Look in your browser's URL as you navigate VuFind and that will give you the filename you're looking for. Edits to these files usually also require a change to the similarly-named Smarty template file in web/interface/themes/[your_theme_name]. For more details on code layout, see the Developer Manual.

Changing the relevance ranking

See the notes on weighting on the Search Customization page for details.

You may also want to change solr/biblio/conf/schema.xml, which controls how your data is processed at index time. For example, to turn off “stemming,” you would remove a filter from this schema.xml file. You might find this page helpful in understanding the processing involved.