VuFind Developers Call Minutes: April 3, 2012

Attending: Filipe Bento, Lutz Biedinger, Demian Katz, Ronan McHugh, Benjamin Mosior, Tod Olson, Ernie Simuro

• VUFIND-317 - A patch for handling large numbers of previews (Google Books, HathiTrust, etc.) has been posted here; Demian will test and commit when time allows.
• VUFIND-318 - A patch for improved configuration of book previews has been posted here; Demian will review after vacation.
• VUFIND-340 - Mark Triggs has made progress on the security patch, but some issues arose that are currently being discussed on the mailing lists.
• VUFIND-522 - A patch has been posted to this ticket showing how to implement user-selected authentication options.
• VUFIND-523 - As discussed on the last call, SOLR_HOME handling has been changed in the import scripts; this may require some people to add missing settings to their import/import.properties file. VuFind 2.0 will auto-configure this file as part of installation.
• VUFIND-525 - Tod Olson remains interested in switching the edition field to be multi-valued in the schema; Demian will look into at least making the PHP code tolerant of either single or multiple values. We discussed whether it would make sense to have separate record driver methods for getting single-valued vs. multi-valued editions (i.e getEdition returning string vs. getEditions returning array) but this seems like overkill. It is probably simpler to have getEdition return an array and adjust all the calling code to handle arrays appropriately.
• VUFIND-528 - Luke has posted an update to his “no/disabled ILS” driver.
• VUFIND-537 - This ticket identifies a Solr error generated by invalid fuzzy searches; we should handle it more gracefully.
• VUFIND-538 - This ticket provides a new recommendation module for using authority records.
• VUFIND-539 - This ticket discusses the possibility of XSLT2 support in the XML import tool.
• VUFIND-540 / VUFIND-541 - These patches offer some new fixes to the Voyager drivers; Demian will review and commit after vacation.
• VUFIND-542 - This ticket points out limitations in the way the current Solr schema represents authors; please comment with suggestions for improvements.
• VUFIND-543 - Filipe has submitted some improvements to the DOAJ XSLT import script; Demian will review and commit when he has time.
• VUFIND-544 - This patch improves 856 handling in the MARC record driver; Demian will review (and most likely commit) in the near future.
• VUFIND-545 - This patch adds an option to use SFX to display graphics based on OpenURLs (i.e. different images for full-text available vs. unavailable).

Demian has implemented “new items” search and the OAI-PMH harvest tool, as well as finishing the Summon module and porting all remaining recommendation modules. Some minor details, like improved naming of environment variables and local-instance-based cache storage, have also been achieved.

VuFind 2.0's install script and SolrMarc configuration have been adjusted so that SolrMarc configurations, translation maps and BeanShell scripts can now reside in a specific local settings directory for easier upgrades. The XSLT importer has also been ported over and now respects local settings directories.

Demian is currently in the process of updating the OAI server code, using the SimpleXML library instead of Smarty to generate responses. SimpleXML is not always so simple.

Chris has made significant progress on the Browse module – code is now in the branch, though a few refinements are still in progress. He has also begun work on building the Record Driver Method Master List in the documentation.

There was a discussion about whether it is a good idea to start a new VuFind implementation using the 2.0 code. Demian does not advise using 2.0 code in production yet, but for development purposes, it should be safe – although some significant details may change when Zend Framework 2 is released (if we decide to update the framework underlying VuFind 2), the configuration files and basic interfaces should be relatively stable and any changes will be largely syntactical (i.e. introduction of PHP namespaces). The main area to watch out for is the interface – depending on how dramatically Zend Framework 2 changes its templating system, this may be the most painful area to upgrade.

No news (except that the problem Filipe reported a couple of weeks ago seems to be resolved).

No news this week.

Demian is currently focusing on finishing porting existing VuFind functionality to 2.0; after that is complete, he will work on porting over the new hierarchy code and at the same time will clean up the 1.x collection branch so it is ready to merge into the trunk for the release of VuFind 1.4.

Tod and Demian discussed the possibility of collaborating on VuFind integration with Kuali OLE; they will talk about this in more detail when Demian returns from vacation.

The next call will be Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).