There was a high volume of development activity in September. While much of the work was focused on finishing up outstanding work on release 9.1, there were also several significant new feature contributions, many related to work presented at the Summit held during WOLFcon. Highlights of completed work include added support for advanced search in blended search mode, improvements to OpenURL generation, significant cleanup to existing language files, and many more accessibility improvements and bug fixes. New features now in development (likely to be included in release 10.0 or 10.1) include a new "Combined" ILS driver for composing functionality from multiple systems, support for ILS-driven "bound-with" displays, an "explain" feature for debugging query behavior, and a built-in mini-CMS for managing announcements and alerts.

All video recordings from the VuFind® Summit 2023 at WOLFcon have been processed and posted. You can watch everything through the VuFind® Summit 2023 YouTube playlist.

The Project Management Committee continued to discuss ongoing documentation and fundraising work at their September meeting. They also began discussing a new topic: possible implications of the EU Cyber Resilience Act, an upcoming law which may have prove problematic for open source communities. You can learn more about this through the Eclipse Foundation's Open Letter to the European Commission on the Cyber Resilience Act and the Apache Foundation's "Save Open Source" article.

The PMC also scheduled the 9.1 release and made significant progress on internationalization, described in more detail below.

Release 9.1 has been scheduled for October 30, 2023, so much of October's development effort will be focused on finishing touches on the release and fixes to any last-minute bugs and accessibility issues. Work on 10.0 will increase in intensity beginning in November. Community members are encouraged to check out the latest dev branch and try things out if they want to preview most of the changes coming in the new release; bug reports are greatly appreciated at this time.

In preparation for release 9.1, the project is temporarily freezing the merging of any pull requests that add new language strings, as translation is now underway, and it is too late to add new text to the project until after the release.

Through the efforts of the Project Management Committee, the project is now using Lokalise as a translation platform to help streamline the work of volunteer translators.

While translation is underway, you can follow the work's progress on the Translations board in GitHub. Note that several languages currently lack translators, as noted in the “No Current Translator” column. If you are interested in helping with any of these languages (or with new languages not currently supported by the project), please reach out to info@vufind.org and we can set you up with a Lokalise account.

The following items were completed in the past month and will be included in release 9.1:

• Accessibility: improve advanced search remove group labels: #3109
• Add a composer script to update npm dependencies: #3073
• Add an icon set for unicode symbols and use it in hierarchical facets: #3078
• Add aria-hidden to COinS titles: #3120
• Add 'combined' indicator to backend result-list: #3079
• Add endpoint url to error messages logged in OAuth2 token trait: #3105
• Add link to advanced search in combined results: #3099
• Add Lokalise i18n string import command: #3048
• Add package-lock.json to .gitignore: #3071
• Add place of publication to book OpenUrl: #3061
• Add prepend operation for custom munge: #3100
• Add SOLR_JAR_PATH variable to index-alphabetic-browse: #3088
• Add support for advanced search with Blender: #3068
• Add translations to improve accessibility for account/list checkboxes: #2982
• Allow users to view their proxy relationships: VUFIND-1598 / #3006
• Alma and FOLIO: Fix grouping holdings by holdings_id: VUFIND-1641 / #3101 / #3102
• Alphabrowse: new normalizer for titles based on SolrMarc titleSortLower: VUFIND-1630 / #3024
• Always add quotes around the name in “From” email header: #3060
• Blender config: Fix SolrAuth typo: #3065
• Change hierarchical facets from jsTree to a plain HTML tree: #3047
• Clean up self-closing tags for HTML validation: #3066
• Clean up unnecessary quotes in language files: #3056
• Fix autocomplete autosubmit for multiple inputs on the same page: VUFIND-1638 / #3091
• Fix autocomplete/searchbox bugs; add autocomplete formatting configs: #2979
• Fix broken list tag query (and add test): #3067, #3074
• Fix bug: “SolrAuthor” unexpectedly displays in combined search type drop-down: VUFIND-1637 / #3081, #3095
• Fix issues with too long sets of work keys in queries and URLs: #3087
• Fix out-of-sync PHP version comments: #3090
• Fix record redirect to collection to not mess up encoding of record id: #3072
• Fix “Reset filters” button position: VUFIND-1636 / #3093
• Fix Search Tools heading and list accessibility: #3070
• Generate useful OpenURL for eBook: #3059
• Hash passwords by default: #3043
• Import native functions to improve opcache performance: #3062, vufindhttp#24
• Improve 'Export to' translation string to include token: #3057
• Improve quote handling to make language .ini files valid: #3089
• Improve translations (add new/missing strings, adjust whitespace, fix typos): #3104, #3106, #3111, #3115, #3116, #3117, #3119
• Quote numeric language keys for Lokalise compatibility: #3044
• Refactor reset button code: #3080, #3085, #3110
• Remove deprecated tools (phpcpd/phploc): #3016
• Remove unnecessary IE polyfill: #3082
• Sierra: Fix PHP error when an item doesn't have a barcode: #3097
• Simplify resultScrollerActive() code: #3075
• Update tools in preparation for release 9.1: #3092, vufindhttp#25
• Use null coalescing to simplify combined search templates: #3118
• Widen lightbox: #3086

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

• Accessibility: refine search facets to ul: #3108
• Accessibility: top recommendations to ul: #3107
• Add grid-based stack placement for combined search: #3077
• Add option to enable facet filters for advanced search facets: #3098
• Combined ILS Driver: #3112
• Fix autocomplete opening with autofocus: #3064
• Fix combined filter dropdown padding and colors: #3113
• Fix record tab heading level: #3076
• Fix search history behavior when login is disabled: #3114
• FOLIO: Display bound-with titles: #3094
• Improve icon helper escaping logic: #3084
• Narrow the first holdings tab column to 25% width: #3096
• Search result explanation feature: #3069
• VuFind® Notifications CMS: #3103

• Eliminate submit inputs named “submit”: VUFIND-1640
• Improve EDS cover image fallback behavior: VUFIND-1634
• Improve ILS error handling during installation process: VUFIND-1639
• Replace email library: VUFIND-1633
• Search backend for JSTOR: VUFIND-1635

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

• Add filtering capability to facet list pop-up: #2991
• Add support for persistent login: #3027
• Adding optional virtual keyboard to searchbox: #2952
• Convert from Laminas\Db to Doctrine: VUFIND-1480 / #2233
• Switch to Splide Carousel Library: #2934
• Translation of language field in record-related templates: #413