VuFind Developers Call Minutes: July 12, 2011

Attending: Anoop Atre, Filipe Bento, Demian Katz, Sean Purcell, Graham Seaman, Michelle Suranofsky

• VUFIND-274 – Demian has updated the SolrMarc trunk with a compiled Java version of Eoghan's full text indexing patch; this will be part of the next official SolrMarc release (though no official date for that yet).
• VUFIND-418 – Discussion on site-by-site configuration overriding has continued on this ticket; please take a look if you are interested and join in.
• VUFIND-419 – This patch shows how to integrate the XHProf profiler for debugging purposes; Demian plans to do more research into the advantages of XHProf before deciding whether to commit this (he usually uses XDebug, which works without the need for any code changes), but it's an easy patch to apply whether or not it becomes part of the official release.
• VUFIND-420 – This patch uses APC to cache the parsed searchspecs.yaml file in order to improve search performance. Demian will investigate whether this can be expanded to support additional caching mechanisms and will commit if appropriate.

No news – the SolrMarc community seems to be getting closer to a new release, but no official planned release date yet.

Demian has continued making progress on the VuFind 2.0 prototype branch – ILS drivers are now working, and AJAX functionality is also coming together. So far Zend continues to seem well-suited to the job. As always, comments are welcome – code in progress can be found here.

No news this week – Tuan is presumably still working on this.

The cart patch is nearly complete. However, there is one design issue that needs to be discussed: how to reconcile the differences in functionality between the new cart and the existing bulk action logic in the list area.

Demian will set up the new cart code on a demo server and post a link to the vufind-tech list so people can try it out and make suggestions for the next meeting.

Translatewiki.net looks like a useful resource that might help improve VuFind's translation process. It might be worth investigating further, but Demian doesn't currently have time to devote to the process. If any volunteers are interested in taking this on, please let him know!

There was some discussion about advantages of different Linux flavors for running VuFind; Demian favors Ubuntu because its packages tend to be more up-to-date, though some of the more conservative flavors do have the theoretical advantage of greater security/stability.

Graham asked about the status of the updated Aleph driver – there hasn't been news since Vaclav posted his latest version prior to the previous developers call; Graham will check with Vaclav on current status.

Filipe plans to create a patch for numerically rating items in the VuFind index; Demian will take a look when it is ready.

The next call will be Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 11am Eastern Daylight Time (GMT - 4:00).