VuFind Developers Call Minutes: April 14, 2015

Attending: Chris Delis, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Jochen Lienhard, Tod Olson

• VUFIND-1102 / VUFIND-1103 - Both of these tickets relate to improved SSL support for third-party services (OpenLibrary previews and Amazon reviews, to be specific). Both have been resolved through pull requests (#338 and #339, respectively).
• VUFIND-1104 - this ticket discusses overriding view helpers in themes; opened due to a misunderstanding, so closed without action (apart from commenting on the solution to the problem).

• #336 - merged - a bug fix in the logic for looking up the current active locale.
• #337 - in progress - work on making cover images more configurable; right now, the shape of the configuration is being discussed.
• #340 - merged - this contains some work on displaying additional status information (such as “lost”) on the “checked out items” screen for Voyager users.

Thanks to Ere Maijala, we're now using Travis on VuFind's GitHub account for simple PHPUnit/PHP_CodeSniffer testing. This is not intended to replace Jenkins, but it provides an extra line of continuous integration defense and should prove especially helpful for validating pull requests (which are currently ignored by Jenkins).

Tod is testing the code this week and plans to roll it into production soon. Outstanding issues: Beanshell updates and prefix processing.

There hasn't been any further discussion on the solrmarc-tech list since the last call. Bob is busy working with Tod on Syndetics importing, but Tod will check with him when he's done.

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. No further feedback; will merge after adding Blueprint theme support.

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. Demian will review once more and then merge – no objections after several rounds of requesting feedback.

Latest proposal: rather than creating a new repo, just use naming convention for branches in the main GitHub repo. Use a wiki page (or other document) to keep track and document the purpose of these branches. Next step: pick a candidate as a proof of concept and get feedback on the presentation.

Now that we have an authorization system, we may want to replace some of our “is the user logged in?” checks with more targeted permissions for more granular control. Demian will review the code and see if an obvious proposal can be made regarding a particular permission scheme.

Proposed date: May 25, 2015 - gives us about two months from the 2.4 release to catch bugs.

Tod is also working on character modifier normalization and has discovered a NACO standard for this.

Tod is also working on Syndetics integration; he may be able to contribute some new functionality including Table of Contents loading.

Berndt and Jochen will soon be sharing an email on the tech list regarding updates to Shibboleth authentication.

The next call will be Tuesday, April 28, 2015 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).