VuFind Developers Call Minutes: March 13, 2018

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

• VUFIND-999 - This older ticket, about making themes and translation work for the console, has been resolved by recent pull requests (#1130 and #1136). Feel free to open a new ticket if any problems remain.
• VUFIND-1277 - This ticket was opened to track the record driver URL deduplication issue addressed by PR #434, which has been inactive for years. Since no one is working on the code, and the PR needed significant work anyway, it seemed best to close it and move the issue to a ticket for further discussion/voting as needed.

• #1127, #1128 - merged - Geographic feature fixes.
• #1129 - in progress - Switch geographic features to use Leaflet.
• #1130, #1136 - merged - Make more features work correctly in console mode (resolving VUFIND-999).
• #1131 - merged - RecordDataFormatter bug fix.
• #1132 - merged - Translation improvements.
• #1133 - merged - Solr autocomplete bug fix.
• #1134 - in progress - Elimination of short open tags. Decision was made to merge for next time.
• #1135 - merged - Use SSL connection for RefWorks by default.
• #1137 - in progress - RELAIS/E-ZBorrow support for VuFind.
• #1138 - in progress - Refactoring of AjaxController to use plugin manager (for better separation of concerns).
• #1139 - merged - MemCache session bug fix.

This work remains done. If others have time to test and comment, it can be merged to master at any time. Ere says 7.2 is working well for him, so we will merge soon.

This work is now complete. Demian has upgraded the vufind.org server to PHP 7 so that we can safely merge it at any time. No objections to merging.

Priority suggestions from the roadmap are welcome.

Ere suggests performance improvements, like eliminating unnecessary non-JS support.

Claas received results from an accessibility check on website and catalog. Some issues were found; some are bug-related (for example, modal not unhiding correctly in some contexts). Some issues are specific to local theme but others may affect core VuFind. Pull requests will be opened as necessary. (Demian and Ere mentioned that their sites had also gone through some accessibility review but are working fairly well overall; did not encounter modal issue).

FOLIO integration work is going well – Chris has a skeletal FOLIO driver working and is also creating an abstract test case to make implementation of API-based drivers easier in future.

Progress has also been made on the Alma pull request. Ere asked about holdings retrieval speeds; Demian believes these are now improved but more testing is required.

No news.

Leaflet work should be ready for discussion on next call.

No news.

Demian will be traveling on the next scheduled call date (3/27). We agreed to skip that date.

Ere has been making good progress on the Zend Framework 3 upgrade and is finding it fairly easy so far (after an initial learning curve). He likes the trend toward breaking things into smaller pieces for easier overriding.

There was some discussion of other areas in need of improvement – other heavy-weight controllers like MyResearchController, and the ILS drivers. Specific ILS driver discussions:

• getConfig is used in many places; perhaps a better mechanism for reporting ILS capabilities can be developed for greater clarity.
• Some ILS drivers have not been maintained in multiple years; we may want to come up with a process for retiring them, as this legacy code makes future refactoring and improvement more challenging.
• Some ILS drivers are very large; perhaps we should consider breaking them into multiple classes (though this need may go away in future as newer ILS APIs reduce the need for internal logic).
• Ere has implemented some local customer payment and account modification functionality; he may contribute some of this as pull requests in the future.

The next call will be Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 9am Eastern Daylight Time (13:00 GMT).