This month's VuFind development was heavily focused on completing the Blended Search feature, which has now been merged to the dev-9.0 branch for inclusion in the 9.0 release. Work on the Blender code led to a number of bug fixes, improvements and new tests related to VuFind's underlying search system, some of which will be included in release 8.1 and others of which will be deferred until 9.0.

Significant effort was also put into addressing outstanding 8.1 tickets, so that a release date can be scheduled in the fairly near future. Most known issues have now either been resolved or at least have an open pull request associated with them containing work in progress.

Other changes include ongoing theme development (informed in part by conversations at this month's Community Call, which focused on theme strategy), some fixes and improvements to MARC indexing, updates to Markdown support, and a variety of smaller fixes and enhancements.

The Project Management Committee has continued work on a variety of fronts, including planning for future releases, integrating the project with Open Library Foundation services, and developing documentation for vendor partnerships. Most notably, the VuFind JIRA issue tracker is likely to be integrated with the Open Library Foundation's cloud-hosted instance in the near future, which will reduce the maintenance burden on the VuFind team and ensure more timely updates to the application.

The following items were completed in the past month:

• Add a search backend specific css class to results list: #2371
• Add ability to use custom commonmark extensions: #2375
• Add Blender for searching two backends and merging results: #2341
• Add caching support to Primo and EDS connectors: #2406
• Add initial tests for VuFind\Search\Solr\Results: #2380
• Add mechanism for combining raw and translated facet values: #2352
• Add support for modifying Command after it's constructed: #2370
• Add tests for remaining NamedList class methods: #2386
• Add unit tests for getFacetList method of Solr results: #2387
• Adding config for history to KohaRest-ini: #2297
• Allow sub-themes to disable JS files set by parents: VUFIND-1507 / #2392
• Apply XSLT to RSS feed: VUFIND-1494 / #2385
• Clear out any empty filter arrays after removing a filter: #2398
• CommonMark: Sanitize integer config options: #2404
• Eliminate use of deprecated strftime function: VUFIND-1544 / #2384
• Enhance and apply ConfigPluginManagerTrait for tests: #2389
• Fix config sanitization threading bug: VUFIND-1546 / #2376
• Fix facet lightbox params in cluster-list.phtml: #2368
• Fix FacetCloud recommendation module with correct factory config: #2383
• Fix filtering of dynamic checkbox facets: #2366
• Fix removeAllFilters to remove all types of filters: #2395
• Improve advanced search accessibility: #2393
• Improve error message when course reserves indexing fails: #2277
• Improve format detection for articles encoded as “Monograph Component Parts” and electronic resources: #2403, #2408
• Improve test coverage for VuFindSearch\Command namespace: #2373
• Improve user interface for “expand” checkboxes: VUFIND-1539 / #2391
• Improvements to facet/filter processing logic: #2394
• Include all primary authors in export formats: #2367
• Include language parameter in RSS feed links: #2390
• Make getFacetLabel work for checkbox filters: #2259
• Make HideFacetValueListener compatible with multiple backends: #2405
• Make use of ellipsis consistent and customizable in translation: VUFIND-1503 / #2381
• Minor Swedish translation improvement: #2377
• Move hierarchical facet options to the base Options class: #2397
• Primo: Add a couple of special facet value mappings: #2396
• Remove unused Google Maps template (orphaned since 4.0): #2382
• Replace “Piwik” with “Matomo” in upgrade warning: #2409
• Update league/commonmark to 2.x: #2048

Additionally, pull request #2170 (JS helper for VuFind) and pull request #2343 (warning message for non-ES6 browsers) were closed by their creator without being completed. They could be revisited in the future if there is sufficient interest. VUFIND-1542 was opened in error (the bug report was incorrect) and was subsequently closed.

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

• Add a post-processor to support <Consume-Whitespace /> tag: #2374
• Add ability to to process feedback forms in more ways: #2399
• Add missing labels to sliders: VUFIND-1543 / #2388
• Fix: Lightbox external links: VUFIND-1523 / #2401
• Fix long cart print not loading: VUFIND-1509 / #2407
• Make MenuButton Component: #2378
• Refactor cluster list to fix bug and streamline code: #2369
• Remove legacy Google Analytics functionality: #2402
• Standardize getFacets methods of different RecordCollection classes: VUFIND-1540 / #2372
• Wrapped link elements should not have space between the lines: VUFIND-1533 / #2400

• Add a base class for different search backend connectors: VUFIND-1549
• Add delimited/fixed value support to HideFacetValue/ShowFacetValue settings: VUFIND-1548
• Add Mink test coverage for Markdown rendering: VUFIND-1541
• Allow configuration of locale-aware display dates/times: VUFIND-1545
• Normalize search event namespace: VUFIND-1547

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

• makeLink view helper: #1695
• Utilize icon helper: #1962