VuFind Developers Call Minutes: March 3, 2015

Attending: Markus Beh, Filipe Bento, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Tod Olson

• VUFIND-566 - There's some discussion on this older ticket about implementing an SMS plug-in for the Twilio API. If you're interested in working on this, please comment on the ticket.
• VUFIND-589 - Judy Drescher has successfully gotten the current VuFind 2.x Solr instance running as a service under Windows and has added some notes here and in the wiki.
• VUFIND-1092 - This ticket reported a problem in the VuDL module's test suite which was causing Jenkins builds to fail; the issue has been corrected.
• VUFIND-1093 - This ticket points out that validateCredentials(), which seems like a read-only operation, actually causes a database update; it might be best to change this behavior to avoid future confusion, but doing so will require some significant code changes.
• VUFIND-1094 - This ticket points out the need for pagination in some of the ILS account related features; when hundreds of results come back (for checked out items, for example) PHP can run into memory limits.

• #299 - in progress - a feature to allow a user to maintain multiple sets of ILS credentials in a multi-ILS environment.
• #300 - merged - a UI improvement which allows selected facets in the sidebar to be toggled off by clicking on them a second time
• #301 - merged - a test adjustment which led to more robust handling of setlocale() calls in VuFind
• #302 - merged - translation improvements
• #303 - merged - improvements to VuFind's RSS output which allow it to be used as a more full-featured API
• #304 - in progress - configurable cookie paths to avoid conflicts between sessions when multiple VuFind instances are installed under different paths of the same host
• #305 - in progress - improvements to VuFind's call number index schema
• #306 - in progress - an upgrade to the latest Solr release
• #307 - in progress - refactoring of the dynamic route generation logic currently taking place directly in module.config.php
• #308 - in progress - work on Shibboleth-based authorization
• #309 - in progress - cosmetic improvements to hierarchy display

As discussed on the previous call, Demian has reformatted all code to use the new shorter PHP array syntax; additionally, php-cs-fixer has been configured to catch use of the old syntax and break the Jenkins build so that we can remain consistent. Please use new syntax in future code submissions!

Tod has continued work on SolrMarc and Marc4J related to his call number improvements. There will soon be a new Marc4J release, which will be pushed into SolrMarc and will then be followed by a SolrMarc release with Tod's new functions.

Demian has opened a pull request (#305) that significantly simplifies/improves the callnumber-related fields in the Solr schema (as well as their use).

Demian will be able to finish his part of the work once SolrMarc is fully updated.

Demian has begun refactoring route generation (see PR #307) in preparation for building related code generation tools; however, this work is not yet complete.

Demian has opened pull request #306 for upgrading to the latest Solr so that we can begin experimenting. There are still SolrMarc compatibility issues that need to be resolved. Also, Solr is moving toward a different model for handling multiple cores; rather than using solr.xml to define them, it auto-detects them based on directory structure. This works against VuFind's style of defining many cores but leaving most of them commented out until needed. Perhaps the overhead is insignificant, but this might be something we need to think about in future. The current 4.x line continues to respect the old solr.xml format, but that will go away in Solr 5.

Demian has begun work on collecting translations for the 2.4 release, so he won't merge any new features to master that add language strings until after the release.

After talking to Karen Coombs about her work, it was decided to hold off on merging that until after 2.4, to ensure that all of the related OCLC services are out of beta and have stable APIs before releasing code.

That leaves the SolrMarc upgrade and call number issues as the major hold-ups before releasing.

We discussed whether to change the default theme from blueprint to bootstrap3 or bootprint3. No objections to changing, but no decision on which theme to use as new default – Demian will poll the mailing lists.

No release date set yet – March 23 might be a candidate, but we need to wait and see if SolrMarc/Marc4J releases move quickly enough.

Tod asked if we could make edition multi-valued in the schema; Demian will investigate whether that can cause any problems.

The next call will be Tuesday, March 17, 2015 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).