Because of holidays in many parts of the world, VuFind® development slowed down a bit in December, though it certainly did not stop. Significant progress was made in several areas, most notably internationalization, as the project has now introduced another full interface translation: Ukrainian.
This month did bring bad news in the form of the Log4Shell vulnerability, which impacts Solr along with many other Java-based systems. Fortunately, by adding -Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true to the SOLR_ADDITIONAL_JVM_OPTIONS environment variable before running VuFind®'s Solr startup script, it is possible to disable the vulnerable functionality in impacted Solr releases. Additionally, the Solr community has issued a new release including a patched version of log4j, which in turn has been incorporated into the latest VuFind® release, 8.0.3. All VuFind® users are strongly encouraged to either upgrade to VuFind® 8.0.3 or ensure that the above mitigation measure is in place.
The Project Management Committee met in December to continue project planning initiatives. Significant news includes the closing of the User Needs Assessment Survey (results are being analyzed and will be shared next year); progress on developing an easier mechanism for users to submit data to the Customer Installations list; and the fact that VuFind® will once again be represented at the 2022 WOLFcon (details forthcoming).
Due to its proximity to the New Year holiday, the January, 2022 Community Call has been canceled, but calls will resume with the next scheduled meeting on February 1, 2022.
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: