VuFind Developers Call Minutes: May 12, 2015

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

• VUFIND-1033 - A workaround has been found to address the Bootstrap autocomplete limitation discussed here, so the ticket is now resolved.
• VUFIND-1111 - A significant bug in the translation system was reported here (related to the changes introduced in the latest Zend Framework release); this results in the footer of every page being incorrectly translated in release 2.4. A fix will be included in release 2.4.1.
• VUFIND-1112 - This discussion of bad OpenURL links turned out to be related to a local customization, but it raised some questions about better generic behavior that might be worth discussing further.
• VUFIND-1113 - This ticket reports bugs in the hierarchy system; Demian will investigate soon.

• #355, #359 - merged - Trivial changes to eliminate notices/strict messages.
• #356 - merged - An adjustment to the Travis configuration to resolve a problem caused by a Travis update.
• #357 - in progress - Link resolver driver for Redi.
• #358 - merged - An update to ReCaptcha support to account for API changes.
• #360 - merged - Minor fix to the “library cards” functionality.
• #361 - merged - Performance improvement: do no activate highlighting support when unnecessary.
• #362 - merged - Performance improvement: lazy MARC record loading.
• #363 - merged - Minor fix to the deduplication listener.
• #364 - merged - Use 856$3 as another option for labeling URLs in the UI.
• #365 - merged - Workaround for a limitation of Piwik which was causing some custom variable values to be lost.
• #366 - in progress - Facet-specific sort configuration to allow some facet fields to be sorted alphabetically.
• #367 - in progress - Proof of concept refactoring to make recommendation module processing event-driven.
• #368 - in progress - Improvements to translation of hierarchical facets.
• #369 - merged - Removal of empty action attributes from forms in bootstrap3 theme for HTML5 standards compliance.
• #370 - merged - Improved comments in the [Http] section of config.ini to help with SSL configuration.
• #371 - in progress - Support for offloading full MARC records to an external service to reduce index size.

During testing, Tod discovered a local configuration problem that needs to be corrected, leading to another round of tests before the code can go into production – thus, this work is still ongoing.

Demian has made progress on #354, making all of the necessary PHP and XSLT updates to deal with multi-valued primary authors. At this point, the only outstanding issues have to do with porting the indexing routines into the SolrMarc core and dealing with the “author initials” portion of the original proposal (which is essentially a separate issue). Testing/feedback would be appreciated at this point.

General consensus: save the initials for a separate task; finish the first part first.

Task for Demian: review state of SolrMarc/Marc4j issues and send an email to solrmarc-tech summarizing questions, etc.

Question: is it appropriate to use .ini file for relator terms? Would it be better to load terms in properties file? We'll test performance after porting to SolrMarc core.

No news this week.

The “offcanvas” feature used as an example last time has been made configurable and merged to master, so we need a new sample feature to move this forward! We'll put this idea on hold until we have another real-life use case.

There's been some discussion on the mailing list about refactoring the Shibboleth authentication/authorization. Tod will read and comment when possible. Chris D. is willing to test changes when they come along (his local use case is fairly simple).

Some discussion recently arose on the list about giving VuFind a more robust API for accessing information programmatically. Ideas and suggestions for such a project would be welcomed.

Tod advocated for considering the possibility of an SRU endpoint. Demian suggested that if an existing PHP SRU framework existed, it might be interesting to try hooking to VuFind as a proof of concept. Tod found PHP/YAZ, an extension which might be worth investigating.

Some discussion of the conflict between a data-oriented API like SRU and VuFind's more rendered-display-oriented model. Different API designs would serve different use cases, and some are likely incompatible.

None today.

The next call will be Tuesday, May 26, 2015 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).