January's VuFind® development was focused on progress toward the 9.0 release (including completion of another scheduled new feature, a configurable sort tie-breaker field for Solr) as well as accessibility improvements and bug fixes. A minor release to take advantage of recent bug fixes, 8.1.2, is now scheduled for February 6th. The full 9.0 release will follow once pending work in progress is completed. Coordinating and prioritizing this work continues to be a primary focus of the monthly Community Calls, so please consider joining if you're interested in status updates or have development resources to contribute.

As of this writing, the Documentation Survey is still running; if you have not already done so, please provide your feedback before the survey closes on February 3rd.

The Project Management Committee has continued to make progress on standardizing project localization and planning for future fundraising and training. With details about the next WOLFcon beginning to take shape, they will likely turn some attention to planning for the 2023 Summit in the coming month.

The following items were completed in the past month:

• Add “my account” sidebar to “edit list item”: #2678
• Add results metadata as data attributes: #2667
• Add semantics to fines table for screen readers: #2676
• Avoid calling EDS API until necessary: #2643
• Configurable sort tie-breaker: VUFIND-1529 / #2660
• Fix channel encoding/error handling: #2687
• Fix consistency of list menu highlighting/breadcrumbs: #2679
• Fix for query string character prefix: #2670, #2672
• Fix PHP 8.1 compatibility of hierarchy tree formatter: #2673
• FOLIO: Add patron comment support for requests: #2682
• FOLIO: Enhance getMyHolds to provide more properties: #2662
• Hide “searches” in history that are made for the print view: #2671
• Improve behavior/documentation of getSubfieldOrDefault: #2668
• KohaRest: Add an option to allow canceling of holds in transit: #2680
• KohaRest: Remove bad query param: #2681
• Minor documentation updates: #2653
• Separate core fields into their own templates: #2665
• SierraRest: Add dueStatus field to transactions: #2677
• Translation improvements: #2684
• Update vufind-org/vufinddate to 1.2.0: #2675
• VuFindDate: Fix handling Datetime error for PHP 8.2+: #6

Additionally, an old JIRA ticket (VUFIND-1227) was identified which had been fixed back in release 7.0 but left open. It has been appropriately resolved now.

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

• Add ability to pass params into forms: #2674
• Add data-attribute title to facet-groups: #2686
• Announce number of search results in title: #2688
• Corrects non-validating cart dropdown menus: #2669
• FOLIO: more flexible hold exclusion configuration: #2683
• FOLIO: support proxy user requests: #2685
• VuFindHarvest: added parameter 'harvestTestData': vufindharvest#13

• Clarify labeling of list menu: VUFIND-1592
• Ensure JSON encoding of strings embedded in HTML is properly escaped: VUFIND-1593

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

• Convert from Laminas\Db to Doctrine: VUFIND-1480 / #2233
• Investigate possibility to deprecate the Context view helper: VUFIND-1396
• Progressive Themes: SCSS and CSS and dark themes: VUFIND-1590