VuFind Developers Call Minutes: January 24, 2012

Attending: Jeffrey Barnett, Filipe Bento, John Jung, Demian Katz, Sean Purcell, Ernie Simuro

• VUFIND-223 - VuFind 2.0 now supports WorldCat RSS feeds (though only in a rudimentary way, since there is no useful sort option for making feeds “true” RSS).
• VUFIND-423 - A basic implementation of the EBSCO API as a VuFind module has been posted here.
• VUFIND-480 / VUFIND-491 - Both issues discussed last meeting have been committed (more error-tolerant default MARC import settings, addition of dynamic Solr fields in schema with searchspecs_local.yaml support).
• VUFIND-495 - This ticket contains some discussion of an unusual use case for the ILS authentication module; more discussion is needed before deciding whether or not to add a new configuration option to handle this.
• VUFIND-496 - An EdgeNGrams-based autosuggest module has been posted here. This requires an additional Solr core.
• VUFIND-497 / VUFIND-498 - A few minor bug fixes and enhancements to the Voyager and VoyagerRestful drivers have been committed to the trunk in time for the 1.3 release.
• VUFIND-499 - This ticket discusses ways of dealing with multiple values when writing to single-valued Solr fields from the XSLT importer. Please read and comment if the subject is of interest to you.
• VUFIND-500 - This ticket is a reminder that our RDF representation isn't really useful RDF; we should find a better way of generating this data.
• VUFIND-501 - This ticket discusses filtering harvested OAI-PMH records based on the presence of a URL.

All outstanding issues for the 1.3 release have been resolved. Demian is simply waiting for additional language translation files; hopefully a few more will arrive before the release date. It seems extremely likely that the release will go out on schedule.

Demian has continued making progress on filling in missing features; Eoghan's multi-view/multi-limit functionality has been ported over, and RSS feeds are now fully functional. External content like excerpts, reviews and author notes are working. User comments have been implemented. ILS support is complete, including the ability to place and cancel holds. All session configuration options are supported, and some aspects of session cleanup have been improved.

Demian has also started a Why VuFind 2.0? page with some notes on the reasons for the major revision.

Chris has finished porting over the command line tools from the util/ folder, making record deletion, sitemap generation, etc. possible.

Chris and Demian have both worked on adding some new tests.

We discussed local customization – the general feeling was that we should start with a simple mechanism (override files one at a time in their entirety) and worry about devising more complex and granular means of customization in the future as clearer needs arise.

Sean suggested putting up a vufind2 demo site – Demian will look into doing this in the near future.

No news.

Demian will be at the Code4lib conference on 2/7, so we will have to skip that call. If you will be attending the event, there should be opportunities for face-to-face discussion during the breakout sessions.

As mentioned last time, Demian was having trouble getting code coverage reports working for VuFind 2. With help from Chris, the problem has been resolved. You can now see coverage reports (among other things) here.

It should be possible to get much better coverage for the new code. If anyone is interested in helping with test-writing, it's a good way to become familiar with the new code base. Contact Demian for more details.

Demian hopes to have more details on the October VuFind conference soon; watch the mailing lists for more details.

The next call will be Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 11am Eastern Standard Time (GMT - 5:00).