VuFind Developers Call Minutes: July 26, 2011

Attending: Anoop Atre, Jeffrey Barnett, Lutz Biedinger, Demian Katz, Eoghan Ó Carragáin, Luke O'Sullivan, Sean Purcell, Graham Seaman, Michelle Suranofsky, David Uspal

• VUFIND-199 - Graham has offered to share code for implementing a Summon RSS feed using the Summon API; because his code differs greatly from the trunk, no patch is currently attached to the ticket, but relevant code snippets are provided.
• VUFIND-420 - Demian has committed a variation of this patch so that the YAML search specs can now be cached for improved search performance.
• VUFIND-421 - This ticket has been opened to discuss the possibility of adding hierarchical navigation functionality to VuFind for browsing structured collections (i.e. archives). Please read and comment if you are interested in this feature. A patch from the National Library of Ireland is also attached.
• VUFIND-422 - A patch has been posted here to add CAS authentication support to VuFind; if you are interested in CAS, please test and comment. Some of the added features in this patch have helped influence Demian's design of the improved authentication mechanism for VuFind 2.0.
• VUFIND-423 - EBSCO offers an article search API for free to database subscribers; it may be worth building a VuFind module to support this API as a complement to the existing Summon and in-progress Primo Central interfaces. This ticket is a reminder to look into that; Demian will be happy to help if anyone wants to do this but needs guidance on implementation details.
• VUFIND-424 - Anna Headley has contributed some expanded Syndetics functionality; Demian will look into getting this committed shortly after the VuFind 1.2 release (it can't be done sooner since it adds new strings to the language files).
• VUFIND-425 - Eoghan opened this ticket to demonstrate schema.org microdata integration (for better SEO) and to begin discussion on the idea of improved semantic structure within VuFind.

Still waiting for a SolrMarc release – no news yet.

Demian is continuing to make progress on the 2.0 redesign. A few notes:

• Record drivers and recommendation plug-ins have been redesigned so that library code is not explicitly referencing view templates (which was a violation of MVC principles). Now the library code is purely data/logic-oriented, and the view-specific aspects are handled by view helpers. Plug-in/driver authors will know what files to create through naming conventions, and drivers will support template inheritance from parent classes.
• The authentication system is working; Demian opted to use an improved version of Franck Borel's current authentication logic rather than switching to the native Zend_Auth module since Zend_Auth isn't flexible enough for our needs.
• The database connection is working; switching from PEAR's DB_DataObject to Zend_DB is not too difficult. For now, Demian has been focusing on tag functionality – there's a lot more logic to reimplement, but it is straightforward work.
• Lightboxes are working (though only a few have been implemented so far).
• Spell check is working.

Tuan was not able to attend the call, but he reported by email that he has some minor changes to the mobile themes that he plans to commit before the next release.

Luke is continuing to make progress on his patch, and the functionality has been installed at the trunk demo for people to play with. We discussed a solution to the UI inconsistency between the current bulk list functionality in the MyResearch module and the cart functionality added everywhere else. The solution seems to be removing the “auto-add to cart” behavior and replacing it with an explicit “add to cart” button; this allows checkboxes to serve multiple functions when necessary.

Translatewiki.net is interested in working with the VuFind community, but some cleanup needs to be done in the language files before we can join up (moving punctuation out of templates and into language files, using printf-style placeholders instead of separate “before” and “after” strings, a new mechanism for displaying the native language names in the language selection drop-down). Demian doesn't have time to work on this until the 2.0 redesign is complete, but if anyone wants to volunteer to help, please let him know.

Demian coauthored a new VuFind-related article in the latest issue of Code4lib Journal.

No news on the updated Aleph driver – we will revisit the issue when Graham returns from vacation in September.

The next call will be Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 11am Eastern Daylight Time (GMT - 4:00).