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community:newsletter:2020-03

VuFind Newsletter: March, 2020

Highlights / Executive Summary

March was an extremely eventful month for the VuFind project.

Release 6.1.1 came out on time, fixing a few significant bugs from 6.1. Some minor problems remain (notably VUFIND-1385 and VUFIND-1392), so a 6.1.2 release will be scheduled when they are fully resolved. VUFIND-1392 has already been fixed in commit 8c61eb2, but assistance from PostgreSQL users in troubleshooting VUFIND-1385 would be appreciated.

The worldwide COVID-19 crisis has also caused some disruption, with many organizations (including Villanova and other VuFind development partners) transitioning to remote work. This has introduced some distractions that may slow VuFind development, though so far, the pace of work has continued mostly unchanged, as demonstrated by the substantial amount of work completed this month.

Highlights of recent development progress include completion of the initial migration to Laminas, significant progress on large-scale projects like accessibility improvements and the transition from Laminas\Console to Symfony\Console, substantial activity in developing integration with the new FOLIO ILS, and quite a few smaller enhancements such as new feedback form features, more options for serving static content (including the addition of Markdown support and a new ContentBlock plugin), more URL shortener options, and richer schema.org representations. Some new large-scale projects were begin, such as a more generic configurable CAPTCHA system (to offer alternatives to ReCaptcha) and a “record versions” system (for FRBR-like functionality). Some time was also put into improving the flexibility and reliability of VuFind's test suite, which will help developers identify bugs more quickly and consistently.

Recently Completed / Resolved Issues

The following items were completed in the past month:

  • Accessibility improvements: #1582, #1583, #1584
  • Add @depends annotation to PHPUnit tests where appropriate: #1556
  • Add markdown support for content pages: #1552, #1569
  • AJAX account status improvements (more standardized cache clearing, more accurate display of due statuses): #1575, #1576, #1577, #1578
  • Bug fix – bad variable name in scheduled search error message: #1567
  • Bug fix – spaces in paths caused problems with Windows MARC import: VUFIND-1387
  • Bug with slashes in record IDs breaking language form submission: VUFIND-1392 / #1596
  • Configuration setting for default record fields retrieved by Solr: #1568
  • Feedback form improvements/fixes: #1585
  • FOLIO ILS driver improvements (configurable patron login options, more reliable profile lookup, better item numbering, corrected formatting of holding notes): #1542, #1558, #1588, #1589
  • Improved EndNoteWeb export for Summon: #1572
  • Improved OpenURL view helper unit test: VUFIND-1384 / #1570
  • Improved short link privacy/security: #1549
  • Improvements to custom feedback forms: #1565
  • Improvements to schema.org implementation: #1555
  • Laminas migration: #1537
  • Language file typo fixes: #1591
  • Make holdings retrieval preserve any custom array elements: #1590
  • Refactoring language-aware static content loading for better reusability (including new TemplateBased ContentBlock): #1594
  • Remove unused constructor parameter from Formats RecordTab: #1580
  • Set page title correctly on markdown-based content pages: #1595
  • Slot view helper: #1454
  • Support for a separate Gruntfile for local tasks: #1535
  • Test suite improvements (new “phpunitfaster” Phing task, support ChromeDriver without Selenium, allow fractional snooze multipliers): #1561, #1563, #1564
  • Use helper method instead of direct service locator call in HierarchyController: #1557
  • Voyager ILS driver improvement (configurable username field for login): #1559

New Issues

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

Code in Progress

  • Accessibility improvements: #1586, #1587, #1592
  • Allow configuration of multiple DOI handlers: #1560
  • Alternatives to ReCaptcha: VUFIND-1379 / #1574
  • API access to secondary search index: #1593
  • Direct linking (instead of proxying) for cover image URLs: #1566
  • Improved code generators: #1573
  • Record “versions” / FRBR support: VUFIND-120 / #1581
  • Test suite improvements (take screen shots of Mink test failures): #1562

Issue Report / Discussion Only

Active Issues

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

  • Evaluate moving alphabetical browse into Solr: VUFIND-1363
  • FOLIO driver improvement (filter transactions to exclude historical ones): #1579
  • Migrate away from laminas-mvc-console to Symfony/Console: VUFIND-1273 / #1571

(Additionally, many pre-existing pull requests were updated to account for the recent Laminas migration work).

community/newsletter/2020-03.txt · Last modified: 2020/03/31 12:30 by demiankatz