VuFind Developers Call Minutes: October 1, 2013

Attending: Filipe Bento, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, David Maus, Benjamin Mosior, Al Rykhus, Dan Scott, Ben Wiens

• VUFIND-178 - Luke has posted some screen shots of search interfaces for brainstorming purposes.
• VUFIND-422 - Thanks to Tom Misilo, VuFind 2 now has CAS authentication support.
• VUFIND-475 - VuFind now has configuration options to use Summon's s.role setting to retrieve larger result sets for authenticated users.
• VUFIND-488 - Summon searches are now language-aware (relevance ranking is influenced by current language setting).
• VUFIND-546 - As discussed on the previous call, TrieDates are now being used in VuFind's Solr schema; don't forget to reindex!
• VUFIND-636 - Code for EBSCO Discovery support in VuFind 1.x has been posted on this ticket; 2.x support is currently in development.
• VUFIND-656 - The sitemap generator tool can now pull results from multiple Solr cores (e.g. expose authority records as well as biblio records).
• VUFIND-871 - Chris has addressed a minor advanced search cosmetic issue here.
• VUFIND-875 - Demian has completed a recommendation module to manipulate queries in order to (possibly) fix failed searches.
• VUFIND-897 - This ticket proposed using a consolidated search area in the Bootstrap theme, but was subsequently closed as “Won't Fix” when all participants agreed that it was less intuitive than the existing design.
• VUFIND-898 - This ticket addresses a bug in the “add to favorites” functionality within the collection module.
• VUFIND-902 - This ticket proposes boosting newer versions of works; see attached discussion.
• VUFIND-904 - This ticket adds a little more query cleanup to avoid Solr errors caused by freestanding slashes.
• VUFIND-905 - This ticket addresses the need for users to be able to edit/remove their own tags on records outside of favorites; it supersedes the broader VUFIND-217 which has been resolved apart from this small UI issue.
• VUFIND-907 - This ticket reports the development (currently in progress) of a geographic search feature for VuFind (courtesy of Vaclav Rosecky).
• Several further tickets have been opened and closed related to continued development of the Bootstrap theme.

• #36 - This PR proposes expanded facet functionality to resolve VUFIND-45 and VUFIND-177.
• #37 - This merged PR adds an “add new list” link to the Favorites section (previously you could only create a list from within the “add to favorites” dialog).
• #41 - This PR includes many improvements to the Aleph driver. Demian will likely merge soon, but if any Aleph users can test in the meantime, their help would be appreciated.
• Several small PRs have been opened and merged related to continued development of the Bootstrap theme.

A few bugs have been fixed based on reports submitted since the last call. Please continue testing! Villanova will likely move this into production on their local instance within the next month or two.

Dan plans to post an updated PR later this week.

David showed this diagram for a possible family of classes for handling facets. He also showed a demo of tree facets.

Demian will merge his implementation, then David will start a new branch to begin integrating his more granular, flexible back-end code. The external URL-based interface should remain unchanged.

This idea from VUFIND-37 may be worth revisiting. Al is currently working on a 2.0 Aleph driver to meet his needs and will offer feedback soon.

Areas where such templates might be useful:

• Item-level display in the holdings tab
• Some of the MyResearch area functions, such as Profile

Several people on the call expressed a desire to get eDisMax support into 2.2. Demian plans on investigating this very soon. David is also looking into this. It is likely that for most cases, we just can use eDisMax instead of DisMax and remove a lot of complex query building logic from VuFind, but analysis is worthwhile to see if any currently supported VuFind features break when switching query handlers.

Chris and Demian are working on getting the VuDL front end code into the public VuFind repo in time for the Summit; it will live in its own ZF2 module to avoid adding unnecessary overhead for users who don't need it.

The schedule is nearly finalized and will be posted soon.

The next developers call will be canceled due to the summit.

David mentioned the German VuFind Meeting – many users are still on 1.x, but he encouraged upgrading to 2.x before 2.2. One theme: not all Solr features can be easily used with library data. Also an idea in early stages: a group of German libraries pooling resources to finance a VuFind developer.

Filipe mentioned the announcement of the LOBID API.

Benjamin mentioned HAProxy + Solr configuration – he will share documentation soon.

The next call will be Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).