February saw significant progress on preparing the VuFind® 9.0 release, with several long-standing improvements seeing completion and further updates made to most outstanding work. It still seems to be on track for a spring release, and a release date may be announced very soon.

In addition to the already-scheduled 9.0 preparation and some minor bug fixes, several new contributions and improvements were incorporated, including a better “staff view” for non-MARC data, improvements to VuFind®'s internal tracking of the user's search context, and enhancements to the FOLIO and SierraRest ILS drivers.

The Documentation Survey wrapped up early in the month and provided some helpful feedback. The Project Management Committee devoted a significant portion of the February meeting to discussing the survey results and planning to make improvements based on them. The March Community Call will also include some documentation-related discussions, so please consider participating if this topic interests you.

The PMC also engaged in a goal-setting exercise and now has a set of specific goals for 2023. Details can be found in the minutes from the February 13, 2023 PMC meeting.

VuFind® also welcomed its fourth Registered Service Provider in February: HealthNet Nepal.

The following items were completed in the past month and will be included in release 9.0:

• Add ability to pass params into forms: #2674
• Add cover provider for Koha local images: #2444
• Add critical Upgrade step for blowfish deprecation: VUFIND-1563 / #2640
• Add Demo DoiLinker plug-in: #2694
• Add output formatting for arrays on staffviewarray: #2704
• Add retry support to Redis session handler: #2706
• Add storeOffsetsWithPositions to Solr text fields using termVectors: #2695
• Add support for username with Redis sessions: #2691
• Add Vim swap files to .gitignore: #2705
• Always return true from Redis session handler's destroy method: #2700
• Available ISSNs not included in OpenURL for record whose format is “Serial”: VUFIND-1597 / #2713
• Fix labeling of blended results and the Blender test: #2710
• Fix validate ids logic (in AbstractRequestBase/HoldsController): #2696
• FOLIO: Make item sort configurable: #2726
• FOLIO: more flexible hold exclusion configuration: #2683
• Hierarchy Controller: return JSON when getTreeJson produces an error: #2690
• Improve/expand data attributes for analytics: #2686, #2693
• Improve/simplify staff view code/styles: #2714
• Improve styles for links containing icons (and related issues): VUFIND-1533 / #2400, #2724
• Keep current search id in the url: #2701, #2715, #2717, #2725
• Make search history labeling more consistent: VUFIND-1535 / #2698
• Make Solr cores independently configurable: #2711
• Normalize whitespace in templates: #2709
• Overdrive cleanup and improved testability: #2707
• Remove Sierra ILS driver: #2721
• Set a more reasonable default sort for course reserves: #2712
• SierraRest: Add option to display orders and fix display of itemless holdings: #2716
• SierraRest: Add support for checking canFreeze: #2692
• SierraRest: Use RetryTrait to retry requests that receive an empty reply: #2718
• ThemeInfo: Fix getMergedConfig: #2543
• Update Phpstan to version 1.9.17: #2703
• Update various composer dependencies for 9.0 release: #2719, #2727, #2728
• Upgrade to php-cs-fixer 3.14.4, adjust phpcs rules/code to match: #2729
• Upgrade to PHPUnit 9.6 and fix deprecations: #2720
• Use better factory/remove constructor for SolrAuthor results: #2722
• VuFindHarvest: Add stopAfter setting to limit number of records harvested: vufindharvest#13

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

• Component: confirmation menu: #2723
• Remove unused folder_id field from search table: #2699
• Replace Slick Carousel with accessible-slick: #2702
• Semantics for saved search table: #2697

• Prepare for PHPUnit 10: VUFIND-1596
• Provide a direct link to an ILS login form when using ChoiceAuth plus Shibboleth: VUFIND-1594

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

• AJAX status standardization/modernization: #2447
• Announce number of search results in title: #2688
• Convert from Laminas\Db to Doctrine: VUFIND-1480 / #2233
• Corrects non-validating cart dropdown menus: #2669
• FOLIO: support proxy user requests: #2685