This month's VuFind development was heavily focused on completing the Blended Search feature, which has now been merged to the dev-9.0 branch for inclusion in the 9.0 release. Work on the Blender code led to a number of bug fixes, improvements and new tests related to VuFind's underlying search system, some of which will be included in release 8.1 and others of which will be deferred until 9.0.
Significant effort was also put into addressing outstanding 8.1 tickets, so that a release date can be scheduled in the fairly near future. Most known issues have now either been resolved or at least have an open pull request associated with them containing work in progress.
Other changes include ongoing theme development (informed in part by conversations at this month's Community Call, which focused on theme strategy), some fixes and improvements to MARC indexing, updates to Markdown support, and a variety of smaller fixes and enhancements.
The Project Management Committee has continued work on a variety of fronts, including planning for future releases, integrating the project with Open Library Foundation services, and developing documentation for vendor partnerships. Most notably, the VuFind JIRA issue tracker is likely to be integrated with the Open Library Foundation's cloud-hosted instance in the near future, which will reduce the maintenance burden on the VuFind team and ensure more timely updates to the application.
The following items were completed in the past month:
Additionally, pull request #2170 (JS helper for VuFind) and pull request #2343 (warning message for non-ES6 browsers) were closed by their creator without being completed. They could be revisited in the future if there is sufficient interest. VUFIND-1542 was opened in error (the bug report was incorrect) and was subsequently closed.
The following items were reported / begun in the past month, but are not yet completed: