March was an extremely eventful month for the VuFind project.
Release 6.1.1 came out on time, fixing a few significant bugs from 6.1. Some minor problems remain (notably VUFIND-1385 and VUFIND-1392), so a 6.1.2 release will be scheduled when they are fully resolved. VUFIND-1392 has already been fixed in commit 8c61eb2, but assistance from PostgreSQL users in troubleshooting VUFIND-1385 would be appreciated.
The worldwide COVID-19 crisis has also caused some disruption, with many organizations (including Villanova and other VuFind development partners) transitioning to remote work. This has introduced some distractions that may slow VuFind development, though so far, the pace of work has continued mostly unchanged, as demonstrated by the substantial amount of work completed this month.
Highlights of recent development progress include completion of the initial migration to Laminas, significant progress on large-scale projects like accessibility improvements and the transition from Laminas\Console to Symfony\Console, substantial activity in developing integration with the new FOLIO ILS, and quite a few smaller enhancements such as new feedback form features, more options for serving static content (including the addition of Markdown support and a new ContentBlock plugin), more URL shortener options, and richer schema.org representations. Some new large-scale projects were begin, such as a more generic configurable CAPTCHA system (to offer alternatives to ReCaptcha) and a “record versions” system (for FRBR-like functionality). Some time was also put into improving the flexibility and reliability of VuFind's test suite, which will help developers identify bugs more quickly and consistently.
The following items were completed in the past month:
The following items were reported / begun in the past month, but are not yet completed:
The following items saw significant progress / activity during the past month:
(Additionally, many pre-existing pull requests were updated to account for the recent Laminas migration work).