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developers_call:minutes20110614

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VuFind Developers Call Minutes: June 14, 2011

Attending:

Agenda

1. New/Updated JIRA Tickets

2. Wiki Upgrade

Demian has upgraded the wiki to a newer version (2009-12-25c); this adds better spam cleanup tools along with functional enhancements like a better edit mode.

3. Solr 3.1 Update

4. Architecture Improvements

Demian has made some progress on the VuFind 2.0 Proof of Concept. The rudiments of search object and record driver functionality are in place, so the code is now capable of performing a search and rendering a list of results. Many important details are missing (like actually paying attention to user queries, for example), but the demo is getting closer to becoming functional.

The new architecture is a bit more modular than the old design:

  • Rather than a single search object, there are three classes: Search Options (to load all possible settings from configuration files), Search Parameters (to load preferences from the user) and Search Results (which takes a Search Parameters object and then becomes a representation of the search results).
  • Rather than a single record driver object, there are now two parts: the driver, which handles template selection and other “meta-” concerns, and the model, which contains all of the get methods for individual fields like title, author, etc. This makes the driver code less cluttered and gives us a place to put public data access methods for use in templates specified by the driver.

Overall, the Zend Framework seems to be doing a good job. Some big wins:

  • Good auto-loader support and a cleaner layout for file organization (though we may still need to have some discussions about where certain things belong).
  • Exception-driven error handling (no more repeated checking for PEAR_Error objects – we can be modern and use try..catch everywhere).
  • Lots of built-in support classes that take the place of deprecated PEAR features.

Demian's biggest concern at the moment is that the PHP-only templates have a tendency to become ugly and unreadable to an even greater degree than the old Smarty templates (due largely to greater verbosity – <? and ?> instead of { and }, lots of $this→…, etc.). It may be worth brainstorming/discussing ways of addressing this problem in the future.

5. New Mobile Theme

Tuan is going to look into these problems noticed by Filipe:

  • Filters cannot be removed after using narrow search
  • There is no confirmation message after saving a search (but it does work)

We should discuss whether we want to take action on these items:

  • Search history is only available in user area; should it be available elsewhere? Should we rename the link from “History” to “Searches”?
  • There is no “back to results” navigation from the record view
  • No related records are visible on record view
  • When adding to lists, there is currently no way to create a new list
  • Existing lists cannot currently be edited

6. Cart Functionality

Luke has shared his patch with several people, and many problems have been fixed – but there are still some issues yet to be resolved.

7. VuFind 1.2 Release Date / Key Features

8. Other Topics?

Next Call

The next call will be Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (GMT - 4:00).

developers_call/minutes20110614.1307639836.txt.gz · Last modified: 2014/06/13 13:13 (external edit)