VuFind Developers Call Minutes: May 10, 2016

Attending: Matthias Edel, Leila Gonzales, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, André Lahmann, Jochen Lienhard, Brad Patton, Jay Roos

• VUFIND-1170 - Staff view didn't display spaces in MARC records properly; the issue has been fixed. Resolved by PR #694.
• VUFIND-1171 - Documents some problems with the alphabetic browse scripts in release 3.0; these issues will all be fixed in 3.0.1 (and are already fixed in the master and release-3.0 branches).

• #688 - merged - Updates to XCNCIP2 ILS driver.
• #689 - in progress - Work on supporting MARC relator term edge cases. André will do further work on this when time permits.
• #690 - in progress - Improvements to LBS4 ILS driver.
• #691 - merged - Minor MARC record driver bug fix.
• #692 - merged - Translation improvements.
• #693 - in progress - New “channels” browse mode (see below).
• #694 - merged - Fix for VUFIND-1170.
• #695 - merged - Fixed typos in Solr config file comments.
• #696 - merged - Removes some obsolete logic/styling that is no longer needed thanks to the improved lightbox implementation.
• #697 - in progress - Removes the Villanova-specific VuDL logic from master since it is taking up space and nobody else is using it; if we replace this with something of use to the broader community, we will share it. (No objections to this on the call).
• #698 - in progress - Addresses a bug in cache key generation for ILS drivers; PR features some discussion about caching in general. Demian will propose some key naming conventions on the new wiki page for caching.
• #699 - in progress - Bug fix related to “request groups” while placing holds; Demian will review (and likely merge) very soon.

• Discuss Grunt (see PR #659)

Demian encouraged others to review/comment on this pull request.

• Discuss Channels (see #693)

Demian described the new Channels feature (an improved browse mode to aid serendipitous discovery) and encouraged others to try out the pull request and comment on it.

• Fix the “two search boxes for responsiveness” problem
• Settle on code styling (see suggested reading)

Deferred for next call.

• Dealing with MARC 880 field

André has implemented some record driver methods to locate and display MARC 880 content. He will open a pull request when time permits. After the call, Bob Haschart sent a reminder that SolrMarc supports a LNK prefix on field specs that allows relevant information to be indexed out of 880 fields. For example, LNK245ab will pull the 880 equivalents of 245ab where available.

• Status update:

Chris is working to untangle a set of interconnected pull requests. Biggest one: using Bootstrap media objects to simplify HTML/styling of search and list results. Merging this will simplify the bootstrap3-list pull request and hopefully allow that to be merged very soon. Also significant: removing VuDL, to simplify FontAwesome accessibility pull request and allow that to be merged as well. Another small project: improving escaping of ampersands inside HTML attributes.

No news.

Should we consider moving VuFind's OAI-PMH harvester to a separate project? Its only dependency is Zend\Console. Demian will put this on his to-do list.

Jay asked if we had considered giving the ILS drivers their own project; Demian mentioned that André had also suggested this (possibly in combination with something like a DAIA wrapper to optionally utilize the drivers as a stand-alone API). It is mainly a question of finding time to do the refactoring. Jay also mentioned the issue of compatibility – the driver API might need better versioning if maintained independently of VuFind itself.

No news, except to say that Villanova is getting closer to upgrading PHP and thus being ready for this change. At this point, it looks most likely that a ZF upgrade will happen with VuFind 4.0 in about a year's time, with a 3.1 added-feature release happening somewhere in between.

No news.

Leila reports that VuFind 3 has been installed and indexed; Solr 5 introduces some changes to spatial indexing (including polygon support, given the appropriate extra dependencies). Necessary adjustments and additions are being made; OpenLayers work will begin soon, with more news on the next call.

Ere was not able to attend the call but reported via Slack his dissatisfaction with the PR template (particularly the fact that long PR titles overflow AFTER the template rather than before it, causing a strange result). Chris suggested removing the template for now and perhaps replacing it with a set of GitHub recommendations in the wiki (linked from a CONTRIBUTING section in the readme).

For next agenda: “Institutional Home, revisited” “Release 3.0.1 Date.”

The next call will be Tuesday, May 24, 2016 at 9am Eastern Daylight Time (13:00 GMT).