VuFind Developers Call Minutes: May 14, 2013

Attending: Filipe Bento, Chris Fishburn, Demian Katz, Josiah Knoll, Benjamin Mosior, Tod Olson, Sean Purcell, Al Rykhus, Ben Wiens

• VUFIND-106 - VuFind 2.0 tag searches have been made more consistent (all tag searches lead to the tag module) at the cost of some loss of functionality (tag search results are no longer facetable).
• VUFIND-423 - The EBSCO EIT API is being deprecated and will most likely be replaced eventually with a variation of the EDS API. Should we go ahead and close this ticket as “won't fix?”
• VUFIND-433 - This ticket deals with custom installation of PEAR dependencies; since it is not relevant to 2.0, it has been closed as “won't fix.”
• VUFIND-454 - Nathan Tallman has contributed a recommendation module for showing web results here.
• VUFIND-537 - Entering a proximity value of 1.0 no longer causes a fatal error.
• VUFIND-562 - A bug which caused facets containing double quotes or backslashes to apply incorrectly has been fixed.
• VUFIND-630 - This ticket (about a Windows-specific bug that can be resolved through Apache configuration) has been closed now that documentation has been added to config.ini and the wiki installation instructions.
• VUFIND-633 - Auto-detection of browser language preferences is now a standard feature in 2.0.
• VUFIND-655 - Next/previous record navigation can now be enabled for the Summon and WorldCat modules as well as for Solr.
• VUFIND-683 - This bug report (SMS messages fail to send when email subject is blank) has been inactive for a few months, and Demian was unable to reproduce the issue, so it has been closed; feel free to reopen if you find a way to demonstrate the problem. The KLN team will investigate further.
• VUFIND-709 - Processing of queries ending in question marks has been improved (though some imperfections remain).
• VUFIND-726 - There has been some discussion about enhanced AlphaBrowse here.
• VUFIND-748 - Demian has decided not to move language files into the themes, as nobody left any comments on the ticket, suggesting that the status quo is adequate.
• VUFIND-752 - A trivial bug in the VuFind\Config\Writer has been fixed.
• VUFIND-763 - VuFind's Generator meta tag can now be configured through config.ini.
• VUFIND-802 / VUFIND-804 - Further Horizon driver fixes/improvements have been committed.
• VUFIND-803 - This ticket fixes a bug in the AlphaBrowse module that occasionally caused non-working search links to be generated.
• VUFIND-805 - This ticket addresses a problem where entering very long tags would cause duplicate entries to be created in the database.
• VUFIND-806 - This ticket allows multiple call numbers to be displayed in the record holdings tab when there is more than one unique value in a single location.
• VUFIND-807 - This ticket has been opened to allow discussion of editing user ILS account information through the ILS driver.
• VUFIND-808 - This ticket addresses a bug in the MultiBackend driver that breaks patron login; Demian will commit as soon as discussion of the best fix is completed (on KLN to-do list).
• VUFIND-809 - The infrastructure for obtaining confirmation from the user for deleting favorites/lists has been made more generic and simpler.
• VUFIND-810 - This ticket proposes some enhancements to the layoutClass view helper.
• VUFIND-811 - This ticket shows how to add custom numeric ranges to VuFind 2.
• VUFIND-812 - This ticket addresses an RSS feed generation bug that only affects VuFind 1.x.

We should resolve VUFIND-659 soon to ensure that an updated SolrMarc release is ready in time for VuFind 2.0. The hack proposed on the ticket was approved by the group and will be implemented.

The master branch has been updated to use the latest SolrMarc release, so we are ready to upgrade to Solr 4 as soon as version 4.3 is released. Eoghan has just updated the solr4x branch to Solr 4.2.1; we may want to consider accepting this version for master, since currently 4.3 seems to have some new SolrMarc compatibility issues. Demian is leaning toward getting 4.2.1 into master now and worrying about 4.3 later when SolrMarc issues are resolved. No one objected, so the merge will be done soon.

Demian has improved the security of the AjaxController with this commit. Now all AJAX-callable methods are suffixed with “Ajax” to prevent users from calling arbitrary code. Further work should be done to reduce the amount of work done in the AjaxController, but this progress is at least the bare minimum necessary for the 2.0 release.

Demian also believes that reduction of service locator access is sufficient for a 2.0 release – the remaining classes relying on the service locator do so for a specific reason (mostly controllers and controller-like mechanisms, plus a couple of instances where lazy loading seems wise).

We should review JIRA tickets attached to the 2.0 version. Demian has already done a survey of tickets without an assigned version, moving most of them to Wishlist for now.

What other outstanding issues should be cleaned up in advance of 2.0? Some possibilities:

• Reducing use of $this in templates
• Using the url() view helper to generate query parameters rather than hard-coding them

(No strong opinions voiced regarding template cleanup issues).

No news this week.

The most likely dates for the next Summit are October 14-15, 2013. Registration will likely cost $30 per day. We don't have any travel funds for this year, but it is possible a donor may appear before the date of the event.

Filipe is making progress on testing VuFind with JAWS and will report back soon.

The next call will be Tuesday, May 28, 2013 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).