VuFind Developers Call Minutes: July 9, 2013

Attending: Filipe Bento, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, David Maus, Tod Olson, Sean Purcell, Al Rykhus, Ben Wiens

• VUFIND-107 - VuFind now includes a configuration option to turn on tabs in the search box to switch between different modules (Solr, WorldCat, Summon); VuFind attempts to translate searches from one module to another, though there is room to make this smarter.
• VUFIND-454 - VuFind now includes a website core and simple crawler tool; there is considerable room for improvement here, but this provides a useful starting point.
• VUFIND-484 - Demian is making progress on building a generic “combined search” module for multi-column results in VuFind 2.0 (based on Villanova's Solr/Summon setup).
• VUFIND-718 - Summon “Best Bets” functionality has been implemented.
• VUFIND-830, VUFIND-833 - These tickets fix bugs in the 2.0 release: misconfigurations that broke the secondary Solr cores.
• VUFIND-831 - This ticket tracks progress on a Polaris ILS driver.
• VUFIND-832 - This ticket tracks progress on Booksite enhanced content integration.
• VUFIND-834 - This ticket is for discussion of SolrCloud configuration with VuFind. We can discuss this in more detail on the next call, when Benjamin returns.
• VUFIND-835 - This ticket includes a fix to a change tracker bug in 2.0/2.0.1; the bug only affects users indexing via PHP (e.g. using import-xsl.php) – SolrMarc is not affected.
• VUFIND-836 - This ticket is for discussion of issues related to indexing MODS records.
• VUFIND-837 - This ticket proposes a date range feature for filtering statistics.
• VUFIND-838 - This ticket (now committed) adds an AJAX-based Summon results recommendation module.
• VUFIND-839 - This ticket addresses configuration difficulties related to cache files shared between CLI and web modules of the VuFind app.
• VUFIND-840 - This ticket proposes moving spelling query generation to a more appropriate part of the code.
• VUFIND-841 - This ticket addresses some PostgreSQL compatibility issues.

VuFind 2.0.1 was released shortly after the previous call due to serious Solr misconfigurations discussed above.

Al and Tod discussed enhancements to the AlphaBrowse handler and strategies for getting improvements pushed to mainline VuFind. New Java-side features include filtering for consortia, addition of extra data field, and more efficient paging. Javadoc has also been expanded. PHP-side call number normalization has also been introduced (there was discussion of whether this could be better handled by an “analyzer chain” in the Java). Al updated VUFIND-726 with another file.

Demian has begun investigating migration to GitHub; he is currently waiting for a response regarding claiming the “vufind” username (which is currently occupied by another user). We decided to proceed with “vufind.org” as a username if the main option does not open up to us.

David raised some concerns that changes in the 2.0.2 code are BC-breaking, and 2.1 would be a more accurate version number. Demian will renumber versions in JIRA to reflect this.

Chris is working on a Twitter Bootstrap-based VuFind theme and has shared it on GitHub.

Hotel blocks will be reserved shortly.

Chris Hallberg is now a full-time developer on the Villanova team.

The next call will be Tuesday, July 23, 2013 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).