VuFind Developers Call Minutes: November 26, 2013

Attending: Filipe Bento, Anna Headley, Demian Katz, Benjamin Mosior, Hajo Seng, Ben Wiens

• VUFIND-61 - Book cover loading now uses ISBN-13's where possible for more comprehensive support.
• VUFIND-147 - Some suggested improvements to the help screen have been made here; Demian has incorporated them and closed the ticket (but feel free to open new tickets if new ideas arise).
• VUFIND-417 - This ticket involves stopword configuration issues but doesn't have a clear resolution; Demian has closed it due to inactivity.
• VUFIND-442 - This ticket can probably be resolved through better documentation of the new Solr mixin mechanism.
• VUFIND-443 - There has been some discussion of public list viewability here.
• VUFIND-466 - This has been closed, as eDismax support is now avilable in master.
• VUFIND-521 - This ticket talks about determining ILS driver using a field in the Solr index; this functionality is addressed by the MultiBackend driver. There are also some ideas on the ticket about “status provider” records, but no clear course of action. The ticket has been closed as “won't fix” but anyone interested in the “status provider” idea is welcome to open a new, more focused ticket.
• VUFIND-598 - An updated call number normalization script has been posted here.
• VUFIND-934 - This ticket reports that hidden filters are not applied to other editions in VuFind 1.x; the problem is resolved as of 2.0, so the ticket has been closed.
• VUFIND-935 - This ticket tracks known eDismax issues.
• VUFIND-937 - This ticket covers some refactoring of the Solr query builder in the VuFindSearch backend.
• Bootstrap-related tickets continue to arise occasionally as well.

• #53 - This PR has been merged to resolve VUFIND-728; individual facet groups can now be collapsed in the Blueprint and Bootstrap themes.
• #54 - Courtesy of Anna Headley, a new authentication module that allows the user to choose between multiple authentication options.
• #55 - A small Aleph driver fix (merged).

Anna's pull request creates a new level of auth-module-specific template abstraction to allow the side-by-side “choose your authentication type” form to be displayed. There were no objections to introducing this modification to master. Demian will merge after a couple of remaining outstanding issues are resolved.

One thought for the future: a mapping mechanism to reconcile differing usernames between different authentication methods. For now, Anna will add a comment to the config file noting that all auth methods must return compatible username values.

Chris has been looking into refactoring the admin controller to better separate out different parts of the functionality and to incorporate Luke's tag management code.

The consensus was that moving admin functionality to a VuFindAdmin module was the best approach – added security and modularity, with only minimal inconvenience (adding one line to httpd-vufind.conf).

Work is ongoing – some bugs still need fixing.

It is now possible to turn on Extended Dismax in config.ini (global default) or searchspecs.yaml (handler-by-handler override). This will remain off by default until some Solr-side bugs are fixed. Demian is interested in feedback on how well relevance ranking performs with the new handler.

A filter cache scenario has been added to the Google doc. More scenarios will be welcomed; Benjamin and Ben also plan to revisit the mailing list to see if they can find any additional ideas from past discussions.

Anna suggested the possibility of doing further investigation of garbage collection scenarios (as begun at the Summit Hackfest).

No other topics this week. Hajo plans to suggest some new agenda items in January.

The next call will be Tuesday, December 10, 2013 at 10am Eastern Standard Time (15:00 GMT).