September's VuFind® development work was focused on completing the 8.0 release, which went out on schedule (and which was quickly followed by an 8.0.1 release to fix some potentially annoying bugs that were discovered by early adopters). The VuFind® 8.0 press release contains more details on the highlights of the new release. With the major release now completed, work will shift to adding new features for next year's 8.1 release, and beginning to plan further upgrades and architectural improvements for the next major release.
In addition to supporting the completion of the new release, the Project Management Committee, along with some other members of the community, participated in a beta test of the forthcoming It Takes a Village toolkit for open source sustainability. This process included significant brainstorming about possible improvements to VuFind's community, and the PMC will work to put some of these ideas into action over the coming months.
Planning on the Virtual VuFind Summit 2021 is also progressing. The call for papers closed this month, with enough submissions to completely fill the schedule. Thanks to all who participated! Final details of the schedule are now being arranged, and the talks will be announced soon. In the meantime, early registration for the free event is already open.
Finally, this month saw the start of work to update VuFind websites and documentation to reflect the fact that the VuFind® name is now a registered trademark. Trademarking the name helps to protect the project's identity and to discourage misleading or confusing use of its name. The code remains free and open, as always. If your VuFind instance has a “powered by” notice (or equivalent), please update it to include the ® mark. Updated logo graphics are included in the 8.0 release of VuFind and can be downloaded from the logo wiki page.
The following items were completed in the past month:
These PRs were closed because they were determined to be unnecessary:
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: