VuFind Developers Call Minutes: February 4, 2014

Attending: Filipe Bento, Judy Brink-Drescher, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Benjamin Mosior, Tod Olson, Ben Wiens

• VUFIND-947 / VUFIND-948 - Now that 2.2 is released, these tickets have been resolved.
• VUFIND-950 - This minor “avoid PHP notice” fix was merged prior to the 2.2 release.
• VUFIND-951 - This ticket shows some code for adding Google Scholar tags to VuFind. It will probably not be made a standard feature unless it is made configurable and turned off by default, since it is not applicable to most VuFind installations (only useful if VuFind is serving up original full text content).
• VUFIND-952 - This ticket requests better Arabic language support in VuFind; probably more of a Solr configuration issue than a real feature request for VuFind, though there may be some adjustments we could make to improve the situation (like smarter article handling in the XSLT importer).

Several PR's pending the 2.2 release have now been merged.

• #78 - MultiILS authentication has been merged.
• #80 - This PR reports some compatibility issues between jsTree and IE11; the fix involves upgrading, but upgrading requires a newer jQuery than we are currently using. Some further discussion may be necessary.
• #81 - This PR discusses some improvements to language files which would allow explicit inheritance; the functionality has been added, and the language file parser has been improved (and given unit tests) in the process.
• #82 / #84 / #85 - These PRs add “storage retrieval requests” to VuFind (including Voyager and Demo driver support). Work in progress, likely to be merged soon.
• #83 - This PR adds the ability to disable citation formats via config.ini; discussion is ongoing for the best configuration layout.

There was some discussion about the filterCache issue and why the current VuFind settings are so high (no one knows – predates current development team).

Some initial tests have been done with lower numbers and no significant performance change has been seen – but the test queries may be too simple. More tests will be done with more complex queries and larger numbers of filters.

If no obvious performance changes are found, we agreed to bring the numbers down in line with recommendations – the current settings are extremely high.

The release went out on time; no major problems. Demian had to make some last-minute adjustments to the .deb package to account for significant Apache and PHP changes in the latest Ubuntu release.

Tod has been working on adding a call number package to SolrMarc for reuse in the AlphaBrowse handler (and possibly other places like call number sort). The work is based largely on Naomi Dushay's code so far.

The classes are being designed so that they can be extended for local variations of the standards. Once interfaces are finalized, some further refactoring may be possible to improve efficiencies.

Current challenge: figuring out how to reuse code that is part of SolrMarc; this is challenging because of the use of OneJar, the tool that makes SolrMarc a single-jar distribution. It is difficult for external code to access the jars stored within the OneJar file.

Possible ideas (if no OneJar workaround can be found):

- Distribute unpacked SolrMarc with VuFind; as long as scripts work the same, does anyone care?

- Use the import/lib directory somehow?

Demian has begun the cleanup in theme.config.php by creating view helper factories and using those in place of closures. He will proceed to do similar work in module.config.php since there was no objection. There was some discussion about how disruptive this change would be – it shouldn't cause major problems since it is functionally equivalent to the old method; local modules will not break even if they continue to use closures.

Ben has proposed a possible new logo for VuFind, designed to be more “clean” and “flat” than the older logo. See comparison with the original and logo in context. The group was favorably impressed; Demian will investigate trademark/political implications of the change.

Demian has a schedule conflict on the next call date (February 18). We will wait to meet again until March 4.

Benjamin reported progress on establishing a mirror of the wiki in case of future vufind.org outages. He will share news soon.

Demian also reported a new VM for hosting vufind.org, to replace the current aging hardware in the next few weeks.

The next call will be Tuesday, March 4, 2014 at 10am Eastern Standard Time (15:00 GMT).