VuFind Developers Call Minutes: July 21, 2015

Attending: Filipe Bento, Chris Delis, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Kristof Kessler, André Lahmann, Jochen Lienhard, Brad Patton, June Rayner

• VUFIND-926 - Demian closed this old ticket (complaining about speed of importing OAI-PMH records) since new features of the harvester likely resolve some or all of the problem. If people are still having performance issues, new tickets can be opened so we can discuss this in a more up-to-date context.
• VUFIND-1121, VUFIND-1122, VUFIND-1123 - Karen Coombs has continued work on new OCLC service support in VuFind; these tickets (and some earlier ones recently closed) track some of that effort.
• VUFIND-1124 - This ticket suggests making the major field of the users table nullable. However, there is a question of whether this field has any value (VuFind does not use it for anything by default) and of whether other fields should be made nullable as well if this one is changed.
• VUFIND-1125 - The dewey.bsh import script was broken; Demian fixed the problem by importing Tod's updated version from the latest SolrMarc trunk.

• #337 - merged - This older PR has finally been merged, adding some improved configuration options for cover images.
• #407 - merged - Support for per-theme language files has now been merged.
• #409 - in progress - This adds right-to-left support for Arabic, Hebrew, etc.
• #410 - merged - Expanded configuration options for the SolrWeb module.
• #411, #418 - merged - Complete Dutch translation.
• #412 - merged - Minor markup correction.
• #413 - in progress - This proposal for better translation of language names supersedes the earlier #238 and is on hold for updates to #177.
• #414 - merged - This adds more consistent restrictions to limit the size of the result set provided by VuFind in more backends (the functionality already existed for EDS, Primo and Summon, but this adds it to Solr and makes support in other backends trivial to implement).
• #415 - merged - This PR contains discussion on integrating VuFind with the new systemd mechanism in CentOS 7. This turned out not to require any code changes, though some nodes have been added to the wiki.
• #416 - in progress - This adds a “privacy mode” where no user data is stored in the database; more development is needed to ensure that it is bulletproof.
• #417 - merged - This changes p.lead elements to h2/h3 elements for better consistency in the bootstrap3 theme.

We're still waiting on SolrMarc progress for some of the work on this branch. There's also been some recent discussion about the use of Set vs. List in the indexing routines, since we need to be able to correctly align author names with relators. André will put together some sample records to move forward on this.

André has tested the new version of Solr with his custom code and found no problems. We should now be set to merge this to master. Demian will do some SolrMarc-related cleanup (to remove deprecated configuration settings from the properties files) and will merge. After that, he will begin work on a new PR for Solr 5.

André mentioned some new features (such as cursors) that may be enabled by this upgrade.

Please take a look at pull request #397. This includes some work on improving the flexibility of OpenURL support, making the rules for displaying OpenURLs more configurable and less code-based and attempting to normalize method naming and make better use of view helpers. Some of these changes are backward-compatibility breaking, so we should be sure to get this right prior to merging. See also documentation in progress.

The 2015 VuFind Summit will be held on October 12 and 13. Registration will open as soon as the pricing is finalized – we originally expected to have to raise fees to cover costs, but a pending donation may allow us to maintain last year's rates. This will be finalized soon. Watch the wiki page for details (though everything is subject to change for the moment).

Talk proposals would be welcomed so we can begin determining how much of the event will be structured and how much will be “hackfest.”

Jochen inquired about a release date for 2.5 – nothing has been scheduled yet, but we should set a target soon. Demian will put it on the next call agenda.

The next call will be Tuesday, August 4, 2015 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).