There was a high volume of development activity in September. While much of the work was focused on finishing up outstanding work on release 9.1, there were also several significant new feature contributions, many related to work presented at the Summit held during WOLFcon. Highlights of completed work include added support for advanced search in blended search mode, improvements to OpenURL generation, significant cleanup to existing language files, and many more accessibility improvements and bug fixes. New features now in development (likely to be included in release 10.0 or 10.1) include a new "Combined" ILS driver for composing functionality from multiple systems, support for ILS-driven "bound-with" displays, an "explain" feature for debugging query behavior, and a built-in mini-CMS for managing announcements and alerts.
All video recordings from the VuFind® Summit 2023 at WOLFcon have been processed and posted. You can watch everything through the VuFind® Summit 2023 YouTube playlist.
The Project Management Committee continued to discuss ongoing documentation and fundraising work at their September meeting. They also began discussing a new topic: possible implications of the EU Cyber Resilience Act, an upcoming law which may have prove problematic for open source communities. You can learn more about this through the Eclipse Foundation's Open Letter to the European Commission on the Cyber Resilience Act and the Apache Foundation's "Save Open Source" article.
The PMC also scheduled the 9.1 release and made significant progress on internationalization, described in more detail below.
Release 9.1 has been scheduled for October 30, 2023, so much of October's development effort will be focused on finishing touches on the release and fixes to any last-minute bugs and accessibility issues. Work on 10.0 will increase in intensity beginning in November. Community members are encouraged to check out the latest dev branch and try things out if they want to preview most of the changes coming in the new release; bug reports are greatly appreciated at this time.
In preparation for release 9.1, the project is temporarily freezing the merging of any pull requests that add new language strings, as translation is now underway, and it is too late to add new text to the project until after the release.
Through the efforts of the Project Management Committee, the project is now using Lokalise as a translation platform to help streamline the work of volunteer translators.
While translation is underway, you can follow the work's progress on the Translations board in GitHub. Note that several languages currently lack translators, as noted in the “No Current Translator” column. If you are interested in helping with any of these languages (or with new languages not currently supported by the project), please reach out to info@vufind.org and we can set you up with a Lokalise account.
The following items were completed in the past month and will be included in release 9.1:
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: