VuFind Developers Call Minutes: June 25, 2013

Attending: Joe Atzberger, Filipe Bento, Demian Katz, Benjamin Mosior, Ben Wiens, Luke O'Sullivan, Al Rykhus

• VUFIND-652 - This ticket has been reopened because Solr now supports shard-based MoreLikeThis requests.
• VUFIND-663, VUFIND-666, VUFIND-668, VUFIND-676 - As discussed on the previous call, some improvements have been made to the test suite.
• VUFIND-671 - This search refactor ticket has been closed (ongoing, but reasonably well-addressed).
• VUFIND-808 - The MultiBackend driver issue was determined to be a configuration problem rather than a bug; closed with “won't fix.”
• VUFIND-815 - The SolrMarc release didn't happen in time for the 2.0 release, so the upgrade has been deferred to 2.0.1.
• VUFIND-817 - This search system ticket has been resolved.
• VUFIND-822 - With help from Verizon, the SMS bug reported here has been resolved.
• VUFIND-823 - A Shibboleth login bug has been fixed.
• VUFIND-824 - This ticket offers improved Shibboleth logout behavior, which has been committed for 2.0.1.
• VUFIND-825 - This ticket provides a visual facet cloud recommendation module for VuFind 1.x.
• VUFIND-826 - This ticket proposes a more granular ACL for the admin module.
• VUFIND-827 - This ticket proposes ISSN-based cover images (using Syndetics).
• VUFIND-828 - This ticket has been opened to track information related to Unimarc imports (a common request).
• VUFIND-829 - This ticket fixes a bug in the 2.0 release, a misconfiguration that broke the authority core.

VuFind 2.0 was released on schedule. The download page and wiki have been rearranged to reflect 2.0 as the new current version and 1.x as the legacy version.

SourceForge has moved the Git repo; see the download page for more details.

The post-2.0 master has been upgraded to use Zend Framework 2.2.1.

We set a tentative target release date for VuFind 2.0.1: Monday, August 26, 2013.

David observed that VuFindSearch and VuFindHttp are not true services but rather libraries. As a first step, David proposes no longer loading these as modules but instead including the code paths in the autoloader configuration. We can revisit completely eliminating the modules at some future date.

David proposed introducing a VuFindContrib module where experimental/unsupported functionality could be introduced prior to incorporation into the core.

Luke brought up the subject of OR faceting; he would like to see the plumbing built first so that it can be used now, with user interface development coming later.

David's proposal for ParameterProviders to manage search parameters may be helpful for implementing OR faceting – this should be worked on for 2.1 or 2.2.

Luke also brought up the topic of “guided search” (a different version of the advanced search form with less complexity). Ideally this should be possible by creating a new form that builds the existing parameters.

Joe brought up the option of moving development to GitHub; there were no objections – Demian will work on this after finishing his local development work for porting VU customizations to VF2.

Joe also mentioned that his company is working on several public library oriented VuFind customizations, including a Polaris driver and a new web service for enhanced content. He is currently experimenting with Solr's ExternalFile field type for volatile data (e.g. boosting books based on popularity data).

Luke asked about new item search based purely on Solr; Tuan submitted a 1.x patch for this; it just needs to be cleaned up and ported to 2.x.

No news this week.

Demian mentioned the idea of having a hackfest (for veterans) and installfest (for newbies) as part of the Summit; the idea was well-received.

No other topics this week.

The next call will be Tuesday, July 9, 2013 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).