VuFind Developers Call Minutes: February 19, 2013

Attending: Filipe Bento, Demian Katz, Eoghan Ó Carragáin, Sean Purcell, Al Rykhus, Brian Woolstrum

• VUFIND-27 - This ticket involved upgrading a VuFind 1.x database dependency; since 2.x uses different libraries and 1.x development has now ceased, this is closed as “won't fix.”
• VUFIND-454 - Nathan Tallman has shared a template to make web search work in the jquerymobile theme.
• VUFIND-505 - There has been some new discussion of possible facet configuration improvements on this ticket.
• VUFIND-559 - This ticket has some new discussion about upgrading to Solr 4; Eoghan has been working on the project.
• VUFIND-589 - This ticket is now linked to VUFIND-559 – upgrading Solr will also involve upgrading Jetty. We just need to come up with a new strategy for dealing with running Solr as a service under Windows (the current solution does not work with newer versions of Jetty).
• VUFIND-680 - This ticket (some minor indexing improvements) has been committed for 2.0; it should not impact backward-compatibility with 1.x indexes.
• VUFIND-726 - Al has shared his AlphaBrowse improvements here.
• VUFIND-743 - Luke has begun work on a VuFind 2 tag administration module.
• VUFIND-744 - This ticket offers a patch to make Google Analytics configurable through .ini files.
• VUFIND-745 - This ticket proposes improving spell checking with the use of new Solr 4 features.
• VUFIND-746 - This ticket discusses strategies for allowing snippets and highlighting within full text fields; if you want this feature, please vote on the SOLR-3191 ticket, as that feature will make the task simpler.
• VUFIND-747 - This ticket proposes a new view helper to make breadcrumb generation cleaner within the blueprint theme.

Demian has upgraded to Zend Framework 2.1.1. This has allowed implementation of the render.error event, which reduces the chances of the dreaded “white screen of death.”

As mentioned in the JIRA tickets, Eoghan has been working in a branch to upgrade to Solr 4. Given what Demian learned at Code4Lib about the new release, this is an important priority – index size and memory usage will both improve dramatically with the upgrade.

David has also continued search refactoring in another branch.

Demian is currently supporting the launch of a new VuFind 2-based VuDL interface at Villanova (Chris is doing most of the work); he's also planning to prioritize integration of David's search refactoring.

We discussed whether language files should be tied to themes rather than in languages or local/languages directories. The theme-based approach is in some ways more logical than the current approach (it links presentation-related elements together), but it adds some complexity (e.g. theme management may require duplication of custom language files). No firm for/against conclusion was reached. Demian will open a JIRA ticket to allow collection of comments/use cases.

Filipe brought up the point of accessibility – fancy UI design can work against general accessibility. Demian suggested that it would be helpful to have a partner with the resources to keep an eye on accessibility, since it is often difficult to test effectively without dedicated effort. Filipe has access to JAWS and may be able to do at least some testing in this area.

Götz Hatop has built a Solr indexing tool called Shanghai for pulling data from a Jena triplestore.

The Digital Public Library of America has released a new metadata application profile and RDF schema which may be worth a look.

Demian had a good time at Code4Lib and talked with many VuFind users. Several people expressed interest in helping in various ways, including through the creation of a “responsive” theme.

The next call will be Tuesday, March 5, 2013 at 10am Eastern Standard Time (15:00 GMT).