VuFind Developers Call Minutes: March 5, 2013

Attending: Filipe Bento, Demian Katz, David Maus, Luke O'Sullivan, Sean Purcell, Al Rykhus, Jackey (no last name)

• VUFIND-96 - This is an old 1.x-specific Admin ticket that will not be fixed; closed.
• VUFIND-504 - This ticket relates to limitations of VuFind's tag search; the problem is partially fixed in VuFind 2.0, so Demian has closed the ticket – some remaining problems are already addressed by VUFIND-106.
• VUFIND-611 - David has posted notes here about Windows-specific timeout problems in PHP.
• VUFIND-643 - A new version of the MultiBackEnd driver for VF2 has been posted here (along with unit tests); Demian has committed the driver itself and plans to commit the tests after some fixes have been made.
• VUFIND-664, VUFIND-722, VUFIND-723, VUFIND-725 - David has continued to make progress on his search refactoring work.
• VUFIND-682 - This ticket should have been closed some time ago after integration of the VuFindHttp module.
• VUFIND-740 - VuFind 2 Composer integration is now complete.
• VUFIND-747 - Luke has posted a proposed VuFind 2 breadcrumb helper here – please review and comment.
• VUFIND-748 - This ticket was opened as a result of last week's discussion about possibly changing the location of VuFind's language files; please vote/comment if you have an opinion.
• VUFIND-749 - This is a reminder to start making use of publication data in the new RDA 264 field.
• VUFIND-750 - This ticket contains a patch for exporting checked out item due dates to a calendar (Outlook, etc.). This was implemented on 1.x; if someone has time to port to 2.0, that would be a big help.
• VUFIND-751 - This ticket tracks a small bug in the VF2 Admin module (login redirects to the wrong page).
• VUFIND-752 - This ticket tracks a small bug in \VuFind\Config\Writer (multiple instances of the same value are not handled correctly).
• VUFIND-753 - This ticket proposes indexing language codes in addition to (or instead of) indexing their English-language names to simplify internationalization.
• VUFIND-754 - This ticket provides a patch to enhance the NewGenLib driver; Demian has passed it along to the NewGenLib team for approval.
• VUFIND-755 - This ticket provides a mechanism for showing the user currently holding a checked out item (currently NewGenLib-only); obviously not a desirable standard feature for libraries concerned about privacy, but possibly of interest in some specialized situations.

Demian has changed VuFind's vendor/ directory to match the layout generated by Composer and has included a composer.json file which allows regeneration of the directory from remote repositories. Hopefully this will simplify dependency management and make it easier for people to add additional dependencies locally.

The code has been upgraded to a new Zend Framework version once again – 2.1.3 was released shortly after 2.1.2 to address some compatibility bugs. It seems that some people are still having problems with PHP 5.3.3, however – investigation is ongoing.

Demian is continuing to collaborate with David on search refactoring – the \VuFind\Connection\Solr* classes are gradually being phased out.

Demian has completely eliminated static calls to \VuFind\Config\Reader in favor of injecting configurations. This should make code more flexible and testable, though in some cases it increases verbosity.

No news (except to point out that VUFIND-753 recommends using a linked data source to augment VuFind).

David is also interested in making use of the MARC relator terms exposed as URIs by Library of Congress.

Demian has upgraded JIRA.

Villanova's digital library has been upgraded to run on VuFind 2 (it is also using a not-yet-released version 0.6 of VuDL, which uses Fedora instead of eXist as its back-end).

Sean asked if checkbox facets are supported in VuFind 1.4 – they should be (though with some limitations on syntax and initial checked status).

The next call will be Tuesday, March 19, 2013 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).