VuFind Developers Call Minutes: January 17, 2017

Attending: Leila Gonzales, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Claas Kazzer, Jochen Lienhard, Ere Maijala

No new activity.

• #873 - merged - A solution to the inconsistent question mark processing noted by VUFIND-1217, also including some general improvements to query processing (including the elimination of unwanted side effects).
• #874 - in progress - Work in progress on an improved Koha ILS driver.
• #875 - merged - Lightbox bug fix
• #876 - merged - Cart cookie bug fix
• #877, #887 - merged - API improvements
• #878 - in progress - Eliminate eval() from the lightbox code for security purposes.
• #879 - merged - Support for extended subject heading data in record drivers (used by API)
• #880 - merged - Avoid out of memory errors in Phing
• #881 - in progress - Proposed changes to mobile search result appearance.
• #882 - in progress - Improvements to page load performance.
• #883 - in progress - Elimination of obsolete BeanShell scripts and reorganization of custom SolrMarc indexing routines.
• #884 - in progress - Proposed changes to book bag UI
• #885 - in progress - Implementation of configurable search placeholder text
• #886 - merged - Bug fix for checkbox selection in search results
• #888 - in progress - Proposed improvements to the terms() method of the Solr search backend
• #889 - in progress - Bug fix to KohaILSDI driver.

The release went out yesterday, as planned. As usual, a couple of small bugs have already been discovered since the release, so a 3.1.3 is likely.

Discussion continued on VUFIND-1140. VUFIND-1137 was also mentioned.

Some discussion of which templates might justify further refactoring – Chris suggested SideFacets.phtml as a candidate. Ere is also doing some work on supporting multiple images per record which may reveal further areas for improvement.

#693 is very close to being ready for merging. Please test, and comment on whether the Channels name or general UI can be improved.

No news.

Demian is in the midst of configuring the last server at VU that is holding up the PHP version bump. There may be a brief disruption of vufind.org when this cuts over. More news soon.

No news.

Please test #869.

#883 removes BeanShell scripts and improves Java code organization. Demian plans to merge after documenting best practices.

Search placeholder pull request (#885) has backend-based configuration – let us know if greater flexibility is needed.

Improved mobile search result view (#881) – please suggest improvements here if you have any further ideas beyond what has been done here.

New template/view helper for add/remove from cart button to make cart interface more flexible (#884).

Please review language tokenization PR and let us know if we missed anything (#860).

Loading performance improvements (#882) - Chris has been using Lighthouse, a tool for measuring page performance, to collect some suggestions. Main change to discuss here: most scripts are loaded as “deferred” and a mechanism is introduced to support this. The details of that mechanism may merit further discussion. There was some discussion on how this could interact with the asset pipeline.

For 4.0, Chris is considering developing a new default theme to provide a more modern appearance than the current bootprint theme.

Chris showed a preview of a VuFind usage survey. Please share any suggestions on additional questions, etc., via Slack or the vufind-tech mailing list. Chris plans to send the survey out in February and leave it open for a while.

No news this time – Demian expects to have another meeting on the subject soon.

There is a new 'devcall' label on pull requests in GitHub; Chris will use this to highlight pull requests discussed in the dev call to encourage testing/discussion.

Demian has fixed the reverse proxy configuration for GitHub pages, so vufind.org now serves up all pages instead of forwarding to GitHub for some content.

The next call will be Tuesday, January 31, 2017 at 9am Eastern Standard Time (14:00 GMT).