VuFind® Newsletter: February, 2022

While February was a short month, it nonetheless saw a significant amount of work completed on VuFind®, including a new ILS driver (for Lucidea's GeniePlus), a new cover image provider (Bokinfo), some significant bug fixes (most notably a solution to a session-related bug introduced in VuFind 8.0, and to be released in VuFind 8.0.4 in the near future – see VUFIND-1532) and various incremental steps toward the eventual VuFind® 9 release (including raising the PHP version requirement to 7.4 and updating a number of dependencies). Work to improve the speed of VuFind®'s integration tests has also meant that some aspects of development can accelerate due to faster completion of continuous integration jobs.

The Project Management Committee began planning for VuFind®-related content in this year's WOLFcon conference. The group also continued to discuss funding models and sustainability as VuFind®'s formal membership in the Open Library Foundation nears completion.

The following items were completed in the past month:

• Add a simple interval captcha that prevents too frequent actions: #2250
• Add ability to check ObalkyKnih servers are alive: #2290
• Add GeniePlus ILS driver: #2303, #2322, #2323
• Add safeguards to language normalization: #2326
• Add test for email subject: #2302
• Add ThemeConfig view helper: #2218
• Adding Bokinfo as a source for coverimages: #2294, #2298
• Aleph: Use default values for each Holds config key separately: #2306
• Correct typos in Armenian translation: #2320
• Demo driver: make new/recent IDs configurable: #2296
• EDS backend: support additional “missing record” cases: #2324
• Fix bugs in updateRecordId() method: #2314
• Fix construction of query string for EDS Autocomplete requests: #2319
• Fix problems with loss of session data: VUFIND-1532 / #2310 / #2311
• Improve cover tests: #2304
• Improve filter message handling in tag admin: #2263
• Improve performance of integration tests: #2309, #2312, #2317, #2318, #2321
• Include Memcached adapter by default: #2307
• Override relevance for ID-based searches: #2295
• Prevent adding facet count if it is undefined: #2316
• Raise minimum PHP version to 7.4: #2292
• Refactor constants/Laminas app setup to separate files: #2301
• Remove chdir from application initialization: #2305
• Remove obsolete cache settings; make some PHP extensions optional: #2308
• Replace File_MARC with MarcReader and friends: #2252
• Solr fallback record loader: #2315
• Translate form email subject with translate function: #2300
• Update Laminas dependencies (mostly for PHP 8.1 compatibility): #2291
• Upgrade to Laminas\Cache v3: #2299
• XCNCIP2: Add ability to configure problem information showing to user when request fails: #2289

The following items were reported / begun in the past month, but are not yet completed:

• Adding hold history config example to KohaRest.ini: #2293, #2297
• Build OpenURL without http_build_query to avoid PHP array syntax in URL: #2313
• Clean up layout.phtml a bit: #2327
• Relax MarcReader's format checking: #2328
• SierraRest: Rework canceling and updating of holds: #2325
• Update ThemeConfigFactory to use latest laminas-cache settings: #2329

• Configurable sort tie-breaker field: VUFIND-1529
• Per-instance display of checkbox facets in SideFacets module: VUFIND-1528
• Setting up Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU): VUFIND-1530
• Shibboleth / VuFind: VUFIND-1531 (possibly a support request; ticket needs clarification)
• Wrapped link elements should not have space between the lines: VUFIND-1533

The following items saw significant progress / activity during the past month:

• Make getFacetLabel work for checkbox filters: #2259
• Replace database abstraction layer with Doctrine: VUFIND-1480 / #2233
• Update league/commonmark to 2.0: #2048
• Use Citation Style Language (CSL): VUFIND-889 / #1324
• Utilize icon helper: #1962