When moving your VuFind® instance into production, there are quite a few details you should consider. This page helps to gather them into a single list.

One of the most important considerations when going to production is security. See the Security page for some helpful suggestions.

Most of VuFind®'s default user interface is designed to be as generic as possible. However, there are some areas that are intended to be customized with locally-relevant content (or disabled). Some templates you should consider overriding in your local custom theme:

• header.phtml is a good place to add your institution's name and logo.
• footer.phtml includes a “Need Help?” section with some links to information (“Ask a Librarian”, “FAQs”) that you will want to customize or disable.

VuFind®'s default configurations are designed to offer a reasonable starting point for most users, but there are a few settings that you will almost certainly want to change, and there are a number of optional features which are disabled by default but worth considering.

• By default, VuFind® has the “Sample” ILS driver enabled, which returns fake and useless status information. The web-based installer will encourage you to change this.
• By default, VuFind® shows the “topic” facet above the search results, instead of along the side with the rest of the facets. If you dislike this split approach, you can move the topic_facet setting from [ResultsTop] to [Results] in facets.ini.

• For very large indexes, deep navigation into the Solr index can cause performance problems. You can set the result_limit setting in searches.ini to limit pagination.

See the Automation page for some suggestions on automating common tasks to keep your instance up to date and performant.

In particular, don't forget to set up cron jobs to expire old searches and other obsolete data in your database, to avoid uncontrolled table growth.