VuFind Developers Call Minutes: March 31, 2015

Attending: Chris Hallberg, Filipe Bento, Jochen Lienhard, Chris Delis, Tod Olson

• VUFIND-1098 - This ticket proposes that in VuFind's browse module, outgoing links to call number searches should be sorted by call number by default. Chris has implemented the functionality.
• VUFIND-1099 - This ticket proposes a better workflow for the new items module (which currently requires a user to fill out a form before seeing any results); due to the potential complexity of the new items form, this may require significant work, but for the moment, we should at least collect ideas on this ticket.
• VUFIND-1100 - This ticket points out a new data storage mechanism (docValues) in Solr which we may be able to utilize for improved performance; please comment on this ticket if you have opinions on how best to do this.
• VUFIND-1101 - This ticket proposes a CLI tool to force a Solr commit; one has been added (util/commit.php).

• #320 - merged - This adds a feature to the Sierra driver to flag records that have been recently cataloged (i.e. not necessarily out on the shelf yet).
• #321 - merged - This fixes a bug in the Solr deduplication listener.
• #322 - merged - Improved logic for selecting templates based on class inheritance in view helpers without potentially masking unrelated error messages.
• #323 - merged - New feature: specify a default sort option for use with blank searches, since “relevance” is meaningless in that context.
• #324 - merged - Improved data validation in hierarchy tree renderer.
• #325 - merged - Removed the ability to configure custom delimiters in the MultiBackend ILS driver, since this feature did not work correctly/consistently and (as far as we know) was not actually used by anyone.
• #326 - merged - Improved i18n in hierarchical facets.
• #327 - in progress - Work to improve the DAIA ILS driver.
• #328 - merged - Cosmetic improvement to searches.ini to prevent potential confusion.
• #329 - merged - Improved the way the Database authentication module creates users, to reduce redundant logic and centralize user creation in the table object; note that the implementation committed to master is somewhat different from the one originally proposed in this PR.
• #330 - closed - This PR proposes a CLI tool to manage language file synchronization; due to redundancy/overlap with existing tools, it has been closed without action; however, we expect a new PR that's more fully integrated and less redundant to appear soon.
• #331 - in progress - This PR adds some rel=“nofollow” attributes to links in the bootstrap3 theme to improve search engine crawling behavior. We'll merge it soon, but feedback would be appreciated.
• #332 - in progress - This proposes some improvements to the Spanish translation; Spanish speakers are encouraged to review/comment.
• #333 - merged - A fix to the way VuFind deals with colons when preprocessing user search queries; colons inside double quotes are now ignored, since stripping them out can cause phrase searches initiated by alphabrowse to fail unexpectedly.
• #334 - merged - bug fix to VoyagerRestful ILS driver storage retrieval request functionality.
• #335 - in progress - a new configuration for the Voyager ILS driver to help improve status displays.

The 2.4 release went out on schedule. Due to some minor bug fixes and translation updates made since the release, a 2.4.1 release would be justified. We should revisit that issue in a month or two to put out a more fully polished version of the code. A release-2.4 branch has been established for this purpose: please implement bug fixes against that branch; all substantial changes should go to master at this point.

No news.

There hasn't been any further discussion on the solrmarc-tech list since the last call.

Pull request #292, improving the tag interface for VuFind, should be merged soon. Chris is seeking feedback on the UI before this is committed to master.

Pull request #227 (designed to normalize some inconsistent language in the UI) has been floating around for quite a while but no action has been taken; we should come to a consensus and do something about it. No decisions this week.

We have several new features lined up that we often debate whether or not they should be part of master or not (e.g. the offcanvas menus, #214). We often include as many useful features as we can and control it with configs but there's another way… A separate respository/website/use the issues page for useful tweaks that don't belong in master.

Overall positive support for this idea, seems like a logical idea to provide extended functionality, but concerns for extended work to maintain the branches to keep them up to date. Will send an email out to the tech group outlining the idea for more general feedback and will bring up in the call in two weeks.

None this week.

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