About Features Downloads Getting Started Documentation Events Support GitHub

Love VuFind®? Consider becoming a financial supporter. Your support helps build a better VuFind®!

Site Tools


Warning: This page has not been updated in over over a year and may be outdated or deprecated.
developers_call:minutes20120710

VuFind Developers Call Minutes: July 10, 2012

Attending: Filipe Bento, Demian Katz, David Maus, Ronan McHugh, Benjamin Mosior, Tod Olson, Sean Purcell, Al Rykhus, Kate Wolkwitz

Agenda

1. New/Updated JIRA Tickets

  • VUFIND-425 - Using schema.org microdata in VuFind has been discussed further on this ticket.
  • VUFIND-542 - More notes have been added to this proposal for improved author indexing.
  • VUFIND-605 - For VuFind 2, Demian is thinking about abstracting record tabs into their own classes and configuration in order to reduce duplicate code and make record pages easier to customize. If you have ideas on how the configuration should work or how the class interface should look, please comment on the ticket.
  • VUFIND-606 - This ticket suggests building a Z39.50 ILS driver.
  • VUFIND-607 through VUFIND-611 - These tickets point out various design flaws in VuFind 1.x; most are already addressed, at least in part, by the 2.0 design.
  • VUFIND-612 - This ticket describes some of the ways new code can be plugged in to VuFind 2. Further brainstorming on the ticket is encouraged.
  • VUFIND-613 - This ticket proposes a mechanism for remembering filters and settings in a user's account.
  • VUFIND-614 - This ticket discusses persisting user search result page size preferences.
  • VUFIND-615 - This ticket points out an error in comments in config.ini about setting up a database table for logging; Demian will fix it soon.
  • VUFIND-616 - This ticket talks about ORed facets, a subject already covered by a patch on VUFIND-177. VUFIND-616 will be left open as a sub-issue of the more broadly defined VUFIND-177.
  • VUFIND-617 - This ticket shows a way of displaying “place hold” links on the result list as well as the record page; however, the solution is very specific to the DAIA ILS driver, so it can't be committed unless a more generalized solution is devised.
  • VUFIND-618 - A new ILS driver for Symphony Web Services has been committed.
  • VUFIND-619 - This ticket discusses the possible addition of a “remember me” feature for allowing long-term persistent logins.
  • VUFIND-620 - This ticket proposes a facility for sharing favorite lists between multiple users.
  • VUFIND-621 - This ticket reports a bug in the jquerymobile theme; Demian will investigate when time permits.
  • VUFIND-622 - This (2.0alpha) ticket uses linked data techniques to improve Wikipedia support and VuFind's authority module; it is intended as a discussion-starter related to linked data in VuFind.
  • VUFIND-623 - This ticket discusses the hard-coded .xml extension requirement of the batch MARC load script in the harvest directory.
  • VUFIND-624 - Tuan has shared a patch to optionally use the Solr index instead of the ILS driver for the new item module.

2. VuFind 2.0 Update

2.0alpha was released on schedule on July 2nd.

Good design discussions have been taking place on vufind-tech – please join in! Demian needs to start weighing “working code” against “well-integrated, framework-using code.” Once everything is fully functional, significant refactoring is still needed to fully leverage the features of Zend Framework. Anyone with time to learn about the new version of the framework and comment on design issues could be of great help to the project. Particular areas of interest involve the move away from ZF1-style singletons/registries, and the new event handling functionality.

Zend Framework 2 beta 5 was released this week; the VuFind code in Git has been updated to use the latest version.

Kate and Demian had some discussion about the file structure of 2.0beta; Demian plans to write documentation once the design is settled. Most code exists within the module directory, but configurations and themes currently exist outside – we need to decide whether this is the best design or if more things should be moved into the module.

Continuous integration is now pointing at the 2.0beta code on Git and automatically forwarding reports to vufind-admins when things go wrong. We need to work on improving test coverage, among other things. Volunteers are welcome!

David is looking at improving the model for searching; Demian will try to get more search types running in beta to test edge cases against any suggested refactoring.

Kate will work with Demian to begin generating and improving documentation.

3. Git Issues

As anticipated, switching to Git is causing some headaches. In particular, because Sourceforge doesn't support Git over HTTP in their 1.0 configuration, users behind proxies may have difficulty obtaining code. We need to work out best practices for getting around this – for example, can we use GitHub as a proxy?

David Maus pointed out his GitHub copy of vufind2 at https://github.com/dmj/vf2 which others can clone as needed. We will decide on whether to generate an official GitHub vufind2 instance a little later on if we need it for official documentation purposes, etc.; this should be good enough to help the core team get going right now.

4. VuFind Developers Summit 2012

This is the last week for travel assistance requests.

5. Open Data / Shared Central Index

No news, though Filipe hopes to add some new data sources to the wiki soon.

Filipe once again offered to share his archives of harvested data (to save others from having to run the potentially unstable OAI-PMH process themselves). Demian is willing to host these (where legal) on vufind.org if anyone is interested in downloading copies.

There was also some discussion of tag/comment sharing through a central repository (a topic that has been touched on before) – apparently Aquabrowser offers this through a “MyDiscoveries” component. There are a lot of issues here: central server design, protocol design, finding resources to support the infrastructure, investigating copyright concerns, quality control, curation, etc. Demian hopes that the VuFind Summit will offer a forum for beginning to talk about centralized, shared VuFind resources.

Due to the complexity of the tag/comment sharing system, the idea might be worth floating to other discovery communities (i.e. Blacklight, XC) to see if there is interest in a collaborative project.

6. Other Topics?

No further topics were discussed.

Next Call

The next call will be Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).

developers_call/minutes20120710.txt · Last modified: 2014/06/13 13:14 by 127.0.0.1