Because of holidays in many parts of the world, VuFind® development slowed down a bit in December, though it certainly did not stop. Significant progress was made in several areas, most notably internationalization, as the project has now introduced another full interface translation: Ukrainian.

This month did bring bad news in the form of the Log4Shell vulnerability, which impacts Solr along with many other Java-based systems. Fortunately, by adding -Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true to the SOLR_ADDITIONAL_JVM_OPTIONS environment variable before running VuFind®'s Solr startup script, it is possible to disable the vulnerable functionality in impacted Solr releases. Additionally, the Solr community has issued a new release including a patched version of log4j, which in turn has been incorporated into the latest VuFind® release, 8.0.3. All VuFind® users are strongly encouraged to either upgrade to VuFind® 8.0.3 or ensure that the above mitigation measure is in place.

The Project Management Committee met in December to continue project planning initiatives. Significant news includes the closing of the User Needs Assessment Survey (results are being analyzed and will be shared next year); progress on developing an easier mechanism for users to submit data to the Customer Installations list; and the fact that VuFind® will once again be represented at the 2022 WOLFcon (details forthcoming).

Due to its proximity to the New Year holiday, the January, 2022 Community Call has been canceled, but calls will resume with the next scheduled meeting on February 1, 2022.

The following items were completed in the past month:

• Add email message as a view param to feedback response page: #2237
• Add minimal timeout before returning to previous page after printing: #2222
• Add user object as usable parameter when building notification emails: #2221
• Added Ukrainian translation: #2231
• Alma: Encode all url's properly: #2243
• Avoid notice in SearchMemory helper: #2239
• Bug fix: Selected menu style doesn't apply for user lists: #2246
• Form: Add support for labels in email subject, fix form validation etc.: #2230
• Handle collections in merge-marc utility: #2235
• HTML validation fixes: #2234
• Make form sender fields overridable: #2224
• Refactor complex factories for extensibility: VUFIND-1446 / #2223, #2225, #2226, #2229
• Remove an invalid comment from AdminApiController: #2232
• Replace class name strings with static class names: #2227
• Save HTML snapshot with screenshots: #2244
• Set context appropriately for SolrAuth records: #2228
• Upgrade to Solr 8.11.1: #2245
• XCNCIP2: Fix get bibs for bad responses (empty token): #2240
• XCNCIP2: Request all pages of LookupItemSet: #2220

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

• Add as-needed option to ESLint func-names rule: #2248
• Add support for overriding local dir in phing, use for composer qa: #2247
• Avoid notice in EIT code when results are missing: #2238
• Clear also checkboxes in advanced search: #2242
• FOLIO: include course number in course name: #2236
• Replace database abstraction layer with Doctrine: VUFIND-1480 / #2233
• Result counts for inactive tabs: VUFIND-1488 / #2241

• External help links cause lightbox error: VUFIND-1523
• Improve test coverage of feedback forms: VUFIND-1524

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

• Add ThemeConfig view helper: #2218
• makeLink view helper: #1695
• Use Citation Style Language (CSL): VUFIND-889 / #1324
• Utilize icon helper: #1962