VuFind Developers Call Minutes: December 13, 2011

Attending: Filipe Bento, Demian Katz, Sean Purcell, Ernie Simuro

• VUFIND-172 - It sounds like this long-standing problem with case-sensitive wildcard searches will be fixed in the not-too-distant future with the release of Solr 3.6.
• VUFIND-283 - Another cart-related ticket which can be closed now that the code has been committed.
• VUFIND-386 - Demian has updated the enhanced Aleph driver for compatibility with VuFind 1.2 and later, and Vaclav has contributed some additional improvements; we still need to reconcile this with VUFIND-416 before committing an updated driver to the trunk.
• VUFIND-433 - A patch has been posted here to allow VuFind to use a local copy of the PEAR libraries to avoid conflicting with other applications on the system.
• VUFIND-447 - Upgrade scripts have been fixed to automatically rename the vufind.ini to match custom database names.
• VUFIND-451 - The jquerymobile theme now supports the optional Solr-driven reserves searching already supported by all other themes.
• VUFIND-452 - Now that Solr 3.5 has been released and the highlighting issue originally caused by this patch has been resolved, the ticket has been closed – boosts from searchspecs.yaml are now applied to all searches, not just Dismax-powered ones.
• VUFIND-458 - Due to lack of strong opinion, this patch has been committed – we now have both [HiddenFilters] and [RawHiddenFilters] configuration options in searches.ini; we can simplify this in future if necessary.
• VUFIND-459 - An updated MARC-XML merging script has been posted here.
• VUFIND-475 - this is a reminder to provide logic for handling Summon's new s.role authentication parameter.
• VUFIND-476 - Amazon has once again added a new requirement to their APIs. This ticket provides a fix, but be sure to read terms of service before going forward with Amazon usage.
• VUFIND-477 - A patch to add support for leading wildcard searches has been posted here; it is not going to be added to the trunk since it significantly increases index size, but it is easy to apply.
• VUFIND-478 - This ticket refers to a problem with AJAX statuses in VuFind 1.1; it has been closed as unreproducible.
• VUFIND-479 - Checkbox filters used to conflict with facet-driven filters; this patch (which has been committed) makes the two filter mechanisms more compatible with one another.
• VUFIND-480 - This ticket has been opened to allow discussion of the creation of a standard set of dynamic Solr fields to make extensions to VuFind easier without having to edit as many configuration files. Please read and comment if you have an opinion on this.
• VUFIND-481, VUFIND-482, VUFIND-483 - These three tickets offer improvements to VuFind's Shibboleth integration. Demian will likely commit some or all of them in the near future.
• VUFIND-484 - Demian has shared the code to Villanova's Summon / VuFind two-column search here. This is unlikely to become part of the trunk prior to VuFind 2.0, but others might find it useful to see 1.x-compatible code in the meantime.

Demian and Chris have continued implementing MyResearch functionality and have also gotten autocomplete working (in some cases improved over the 1.x functionality). Demian has begun building complex unit tests (code coverage is much easier in the new architecture) and has also created a mechanism for running all the command-line tools through the Zend Framework for greater consistency and easier code sharing.

Demian hopes to port the Shibboleth authentication code in the near future to test VuFind 2's more robust authentication API design (in order to avoid the ugly special cases scattered through VuFind 1.x). If any Shibboleth users are willing to test this once it is done, let Demian know.

No news apart from the completion of VUFIND-451.

Solr 3.5 has been released and will be included as part of the VuFind 1.3 release.

Because of the holidays, the 12/27 call will be skipped.

Demian's VuFind 2.0 talk was not accepted for next year's code4lib (fierce competition!), but he and Sean will both be there (hopefully a breakout session will be possible).

It's also looking likely that the next VuFind conference at Villanova will be the week of October 15, 2012 and will be back-to-back with the next VuStuff conference… but official dates are still forthcoming.

Filipe is starting to experiment with integrating VuFind and elgg for improved tracking of social activities related to records.

The next call will be Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 11am Eastern Standard Time (GMT - 5:00).