VuFind Developers Call Minutes: September 3, 2013

Attending: Filipe Bento, Chris Fishburn, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Benjamin Mosior, Tod Olson, Luke O'Sullivan, Sean Purcell, Al Rykhus

• VUFIND-172 - The “wildcard searches are case sensitive” problem was actually resolved by the upgrade to Solr 4 and thus has been fixed since the 2.0 release. Demian just noticed and closed the ticket.
• VUFIND-428 - VuFind's handling of wildcards has been improved, though all of the issues addressed by this ticket are not yet resolved.
• VUFIND-513 - A workaround for the “slashes in IDs break VuFind URLs” problem (involving a simple Apache configuration setting) has been found and documented, so this ticket has been closed.
• VUFIND-601 - As per this ticket, VuFind now handles escaped slashes and parentheses appropriately.
• VUFIND-847 - Luke has updated his Solr-based new item search code here.
• VUFIND-875 - This ticket proposes a recommendation module to suggest trying a phrase search if a regular search fails (to work around problems like booleans within search terms); Demian will implement when time permits.
• VUFIND-876 - This ticket (committed) covers a small Horizon driver improvement (ignore illegal ID values).
• VUFIND-878 - This ticket proposes some refactoring of the listeners that handle Solr highlighting/spellcheck to reduce redundancy.
• VUFIND-879 - This ticket (committed) adds a mechanism for reprocessing and retrying Solr queries with syntax errors; this is currently used to escape colons and avoid fatal errors involving undefined fields.
• VUFIND-880 - This ticket addresses a bug in the combined search drop-down that was causing queries containing ampersands to fail.

• #16 / #17 - These PR's fix catalog password encryption issues for the Shibboleth and LDAP authentication modules and were committed in time for the 2.1 release; see also VUFIND-866 / VUFIND-867.
• #23 - These Evergreen driver improvements have been committed.
• #24 - This PR (now merged) proposes a mechanism for supporting Solr uniqueKey values other than “id” (related to VUFIND-877).
• #25 - This resolves VUFIND-840, which moves spellcheck behavior out of the Solr backend and into a separate listener.

The release went out on time – no major problems so far, though some small bug fixes have already been made to the 2.1.1 branch. Please test and report issues if time permits.

Demian and Chris are working on polishing this up; once the most obvious issues are solved, we'll push to master so it can release as “experimental” in 2.2 (and others can test/improve in the meantime).

Discussion question: should we disable the Solr stats core by default since it is rarely used?

Group: No objections.

Luke also commented that stats handling in general could use refinement/improvement; currently doesn't handle large data sets well – robot indexing alone can overwhelm the stats system. Demian is not sure whether it's worth the effort of overhauling the internal stats system when external tools are available (Piwik, etc.) but is open to code contributions.

No update this week.

Already on the roadmap:

• Javascript dependency upgrades (VUFIND-844 - jquerymobile (in progress), VUFIND-742 - jquery/jquery-ui (possibly covered by Bootstrap theme if we're not concerned about maintaining Blueprint))
• Breadcrumb helper (VUFIND-747 – needs to be discussed further)

Other possible items to work on:

• More flexible facet behavior (VUFIND-177 - exclude facets, OR facets, etc.)
• Implementation of eDismax handler (VUFIND-466)
• Minor Solr tweaks (VUFIND-428)
• Solr-driven “new items” search (VUFIND-624, VUFIND-847)
• Hierarchical / nested facets (VUFIND-599)
• Improved author indexing (VUFIND-542)
• Redesign of recommendation module mechanism? (VUFIND-881)
• Record deduplication (possibly through more official integration path RecordManager tool)?
• Updated VuDL integration (likely to be implemented this fall at Villanova)

Please vote/comment on tickets that interest you – we will discuss some of these points in greater detail on the next call.

Registration is now open; note that fees are waived for presenters.

Filipe asked about the possibility of remote presentation – we plan to allow remote viewing/participation, so a remote presentation is not out of the question… but on-site presenters will be given preference due to easier logistics.

We tried another Big Blue Button test and it went smoothly, so we will try BBB as the primary call platform starting on the next call.

The next call will be Tuesday, September 17, 2013 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).