With the 6.1 release due at the beginning of February, January was spent putting finishing touches on the release and preparing for work on changes for 7.0.

The most significant development of the month was probably the release of Laminas, the successor to Zend Framework. Work is already well underway on bringing VuFind up to date with this new dependency, so it can be fully incorporated into VuFind 7. Fortunately, the changes are largely cosmetic, and good tools are available to help with migration, so this looks to be a smooth transition.

January also saw VuFind's first appearance at the WOLFcon conference, held this year at Texas A&M. VuFind meetings at the conference focused on FOLIO integration and accessibility and were attended by a mix of VuFind veterans and new potential adopters.

The following items were completed in the past month:

• Fix channels bug when VuFind installed at URL root: #1541 / VUFIND-1377
• Fix form feedback message initialization bug: #1534
• PHP 7.4 testing support: #1532
• Support for Google Scholar meta tags: #1529 / VUFIND-951
• Update dependencies: #1531

This ticket was closed as “won't fix” because of the deprecation of Zend Framework in favor of Laminas, and a long lack of activity:

• Use Zend\AuthenticationService for VuFind's authentication: VUFIND-757

The following items were reported / begun in the past month, but are not yet completed:

• Aleph driver improvements: #1540
• Alma driver improvements: #1530, #1536
• Clarified error messages for email authentication: #1539
• FOLIO driver improvements: #1542
• Improved local configuration of Grunt tasks: #1535
• Migrate from Zend Framework to Laminas: #1537
• More flexible short link redirection, for better compatibility with php-fpm header length limits: #1533
• PHP-based SCSS compiler: #1538

none this month.

The following items saw significant progress / activity during the past month:

• Add print button to record toolbar: #1507
• Change library for managing console actions (discussion only): VUFIND-1273
• Create abstract base class for search listeners (discussion only): VUFIND-878
• Eliminate use of ZendService_Amazon (discussion only): VUFIND-1284
• KohaRest driver development: #1016