VuFind Developers Call Minutes: September 20, 2011

Attending: Filipe Bento, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Tuan Nguyen, Sean Purcell, Ernie Simuro, John Wynstra

• VUFIND-177 - Tuan has expanded the comments on this ticket (about expanded facet behavior) into a more flexible patch for multi-select facets. Demian plans to build on this further by creating several different filter URL parameters that can be mixed and matched, offering maximum flexibility and potential for different user interface designs to be built on top.
• VUFIND-268 - There was some recent discussion on this ticket about patching PEAR to avoid warnings in PHP 5.3.
• VUFIND-276 - Luke has posted a feedback module patch – please test and comment.
• VUFIND-382 - Till's timeline visualization patch has been committed.
• VUFIND-426 - Tuan's “javascript tabs in Blueprint theme” patch has been updated.
• VUFIND-450 - Demian has made some improvements to the RSS feed (inclusion of Dublin Core, new parameter to bypass RSS-specific sorting) in order to allow its use as a simple API of sorts; this will be used in a forthcoming SciVerse gadget. This ticket includes a patch for adding these features to VuFind prior to the 1.3 release.
• VUFIND-451 - Tuan has contributed a patch (already committed) which creates a new Solr core for searching course reserves (instead of relying on the ILS driver exclusively); this ticket is a reminder to add support to the jquerymobile theme for this new mechanism.
• VUFIND-452 - This ticket is a patch to allow the Dismax bq (boost query) option from searchspecs.yaml to be applied to non-Dismax queries in VuFind, making relevance tweaking more consistent. There are some known issues Demian is working on (see comments on ticket). Please test and comment – Demian will commit for the next release if he solves the known problems and no one objects.

Still waiting for a SolrMarc release – no news yet.

Chris Hallberg has continued working with VuFind 2.0; he is currently building a better-integrated VuDL module for VuFind.

Demian has also made some progress, beginning to implement the Author module. Since most searches in VuFind work in very similar ways, Demian has created a generic base Search controller which is extended by other controllers (standard Search and the Author module currently, and things like Summon and WorldCat in the future). This allows most of the logic and template code to be shared, with the Search Object internals defining the differences between different services. This should make the code easier to extend and maintain and should also help with implementation of multi-column solutions like Villanova's VuFind+Summon instance.

Demian investigated the Author module problem mentioned on the last call – it was caused by a missing template. The file has now been added to the trunk. Demian also added missing image files and made a small bug fix involving page titles.

Luke has continued working on the patch, and the latest version is available on the trunk demo instance for experimentation. Recent changes include minor bug fixes and the addition of a configurable hard limit on the number of items allowed in the cart (necessary to prevent users from bumping against inherent software limits like cookie size).

Filipe had some comments on Luke's feedback patch. He will post them to the JIRA ticket for future reference.

Demian is currently working on a website search module for Villanova's VuFind. It is currently very institution-specific, but he will look into sharing code when it is complete. Contact Demian if you're interested in a preview in the meantime.

John mentioned that SFX now includes an official VuFind target.

Filipe reports that VuFind got some mentions at the IGeLU 2011 conference (including a poster by Tulie Amichal).

Sean will be testing the Primo/VuFind connector demonstrated by Chris Spalding at the 2010 VuFind Summit.

Tuan will be attending the Access 2011 conference in Vancouver – look for him if you will be there.

There was also discussion of another VuFind conference to follow up on the 2010 summit. There are no plans for 2011, but Villanova will investigate the possibility of a 2012 event. If you are interested, let us know – it would be helpful to gauge interest.

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