VuFind Developers Call Minutes: August 1, 2017

Attending: Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Jochen Lienhard, Tod Olson, Brad Patton

• VUFIND-1237 - This ticket reports an apparent break (perhaps an API compatibility issue) in the Facebook login logic.
• VUFIND-1238 - This ticket is for discussing the possible value of incorporating bulk record actions into account screens like checked out items, holds, etc.
• VUFIND-1239 - This ticket duplicates the resolved ticket VUFIND-1235; it has been closed.

• #1008 - merged - Adds configurable port to the database configuration string.
• #1009 - merged - Adds a new option (prefixing a text domain to strings before translating them) for the RecordDataFormatter.
• #1010 - merged - Adds a Composer dependency to ensure that the Phing-initiated download and installation of Solr works correctly on all platforms.
• #1011 - in progress - Work on a theme compiler to flatten hierarchical themes for improved performance.

Ben Mosior is not going to be able to pursue this commercially at the moment, but he will try to finish up the work in progress so we can merge it. He may also be able to present at the VuFind Summit to encourage others to pick up where he has left off.

Jochen has been giving this some thought, but no implementation yet. Will open a pull request when time permits.

Demian has spent a little more time testing PR #963 and expanding the TODO list; he has also started developing a theme compiler (PR #1011), which will be an important complement to this feature. There is still considerably more work to be done (and decisions to be made) before merging this.

No news.

There has been some discussion relevant to this issue on PR #956, the “generate theme” feature, where documentation is under development.

No news.

Tod has continued to work on AlphaBrowse handler optimizations and cleanup. Specific code in need of optimization has been identified: Lucene simple collector needs to be replaced with some other mechanism that can be configured to stop collecting after reaching a configured limit. Tod would welcome suggestions on this. Also significant: discussion of a compatibility change related to moving id retrieval into the extras list in future, rather than always retrieving id by default. Another discussion: how to set up semantic versioning for the project – perhaps we should mint a 1.0.0 browse handler at the end of this project as a baseline for future semantic versioning.

Demian proposes releasing 4.0.1 on August 28th and 4.1 on October 2nd (if we feel we can develop enough features to justify it). Possible goals for 4.1: prototype Alma driver, mix-in support, outstanding sandal theme improvements. No objections.

No news – please remember to submit talk proposals if you are interested!

No news.

Demian and Chris will both be on vacation on 8/15. We will skip that call date and meet next on 8/29.

There has been recent discussion about a problem with Amazon content; Demian asked if anyone on the call was using this feature. No comments.

The next call will be Tuesday, August 29, 2017 at 9am Eastern Daylight Time (13:00 GMT).