This recording, from the October 3, 2023 Community Call, highlights new features and significant changes in the VuFind® 9.1 release.

Video is available as an mp4 download or through YouTube.

This is a machine-generated transcript; it will be improved upon as time permits.

all right so this is the vufine 9.1 what's new what's changed video uh we've got a minor release coming this month and this will cover everything that is new here so first of all a few new features uh we've had a couple of new search backends contributed one for the Eco publication finder which lets you search uh titles in the Epco knowledge base and one for the databases a toz portion of lib guides uh both of these are essentially new features related to existing backends but they add a little bit more flexibility and are particularly useful uh in multicolumn search if you have subscriptions to these services or for uh displaying recommendation modules uh We've also had a few new uh ILS driver methods added so there are some new features that drivers can support of course these are not implemented for all of our driers yet but if it's a feature you need uh it could be added to your driver as long as the underlying ILS supports it uh they are get proxying users which uh is used for getting a list of users that have a proxy relationship with uh the current user uh get URLs for record uh which is used for getting links related to a specific record ID uh it's specifically being used in order to link from viewfinder history which supports a new feature to purge user transaction history uh there's also a new ILS driver feature that's been implemented which is the idea of an uncertain availability status so historically availability status was binary but sometimes you don't know and so now that can be represented in the view find system uh Beyond those new features there's a whole bunch of improvements uh We've enhanced some of our command line tools so uh for example the import Mark script can now accept multiple files in a single call which can be a huge timesaver because there's a lot of overhead in starting up and shutting down solar mark But if you provide a whole series of file names you save on all of that overhead uh also the util deletes tool for removing records from ER now has an ID prefix switch so if you prefix your IDs and you want to delete all of the records in a mark file you can specify the prefix and it will work as desired uh We've also had several improvements contributed to combined search uh you can now turn on advanced search links uh in each column of combined search results there's a new grid layout uh which is an alternative to the uh current distributed layout that does a better job job of keeping the columns in the configured order uh when they react and reformat on smaller screens and uh there's the ability to turn on a jump menu at the top of the page to jump down to particular columns uh there have also been some improvements to the cache system uh now when you have uh record caching turned on in fallback mode uh it can be set up to display a warning that you're viewing a cached version of a record which might be helpful for providing context to users uh and also the entire file based caching system can now be turned off through configuration uh if you want to be sure nothing is being cached this could be useful for example when troubleshooting things uh there have been some other new configuration improvements and new settings uh one significant thing is there's support for a new config file called dur locations. which can be put inside your local settings directory in the root and this specifies where inside the directory some of your files are found and can be used to set up a chain of inheritance to other directories uh which offers a lot more flexibility if you have you know many instances of view find that you want to share uh configurations between them in complex ways uh another new setting is the ability to specify more than one fave icon in a theme uh previously view find supported just one but sometimes it's useful to specify many so that you can offer different sizes and formats that will be used by the browser in different contexts uh and finally uh there are now config settings in searches. that can be used to configure solar's uh highlighting parameters so for example uh I ran into some problems where Snippets were displaying in weird ways and the easiest way to fix that was to give some more specific highlighting parameters to solar to to uh shorten the size of the Snippets uh there have also been some significant improvements to internationalization uh there's a new language code supported called debug uh and if you turn on the language debug you will see all of the raw translation strings and Associated parameters instead of anything being translated this could be useful if you're trying to figure out where in the language files a particular string in the interface is coming from um there's also a new setting called fallback languages which can be used to control language inheritance so if view find tries to translate a string and it's not available in the currently active language previously view find would always then default to English but with this setting you can specify different fallback languages instead and in order of searching and we have a whole new interface language uh Northern Sami uh there have also been improvements in updates to a few ILS drivers for Alma folio and Sierra rest so if you use these systems uh check the change log for more details um additionally some other miscellaneous improvements uh if you have search tabs turned on and you have filtered tabs and you apply a hidden filter that does not match any of the tabs uh you will now get a custom search tab displayed to differentiate that uh and this can be turned off through configuration if you don't want it uh you can specify a custom solar port at installation time so uh if you don't want to use the default 8983 there's now a way you can set that up without having to manually edit a whole bunch of files you just specify a different port numberers through the uh install.php script at the command line and there's been a lot of accessibility improvements so um many templates have changed and that's something to be aware of if you're upgrading your custom themes I don't think any of these changes are too shocking but some of them are impactful because you know they involve things like using more specific semantic tags and so forth could cause some conflicts with your local customizations that you'll need to reconcile when you update uh there have also been some dependency changes uh we've raised our minimum PHP version to 8.0 since the php7 line is no longer Ed uh We've upgraded solar to 9.3 uh as always with a solar upgrade uh fully re-indexing everything is thus recommended and we've upgraded solar Mark to version 3.5 and while we're talking about solar Mark let's talk about uh indexing changes because the upgrade to the new solar Mark does have one significant impact which is that older versions of solar Mark uh required translation maps to be stored in Latin one encoding which was really problematic because everything else in viewfinder and now uh translation maps are expected to be in utf8 but that means that if you have custom translation Maps containing special characters and they're in Latin one encoding you will need to convert them to utf8 before doing further indexing or else uh you might get some weird characters in your index uh additionally and this isn't related to solar Mark but is related to indexing uh you should reindex all of your XML records I mean you need to reindex anyway because of the solar upgrade but it's particularly important to reindex XML uh because one of the significant bug fixes in 9.1 is that we discovered that the uh title sort field was being populated using different normalization algorithms between solar Mark and our XML import tool and this was resulting in uh some problems in the alphabetical browse and some inconsistent sorting so we changed all of our XML import to uh match solar Mark uh so you need to reindex to take advantage of that and similarly if you have custom XML Imports you should review uh the changes in the main project to title sort indexing and make sure that your code matches if you want title sorting and alphabetical browsing to work consistently uh We've also made a few changes to Integrations with external Services uh for Epco Discovery service um there's been a new configuration setting added to EDS inii uh so that it uses uh separate URLs for accessing the API and establishing new sessions in most cases these values are the same but there are some situations where they need to be different so if you've customized the API URL setting in your eds. inii you might need to uh take a look at the session URL setting as well and make it match I don't think this affects very many people if any uh additionally when the Epco publication finder backend was added it utilizes some of the Eds code and that led to a bit of refactoring so if you have low-level custom EDS code you might want to review the changes but again this seems like an unlikely situation uh and a few other things have been revised the uh cover loaders for Google and orb have been Rewritten to add caching support again this shouldn't impact anyone unless you've customized these which seems unlikely uh and the view fine service recapture class was significantly Rewritten because the laminas recapture Library it depends on changed significantly as well so if you've customized that another area where uh work may be needed but it's unlikely that you've customized that there have also been some user interface changes we did a little bit of uh rerouting so Blended search used to be uh at the search Blended route but in order to add more functionality it was moved out to its own controller so that other route has been deprecated uh it still works and redirects but you don't want to rely on it in the future and similarly historic transaction support has been given its own uh method in the checkouts control instead of being part of the My resarch Controller uh and a few other things hierarchical facet displays have been totally rebuilt to improve accessibility and eliminate uh the use of JS tree so if you've customized any of that you'll want to review our changes and uh icon helper templates have been adjusted to fix some inconsistent escaping behavior um so if you've created your own icon format for some reason uh you might want to review this otherwise it shouldn't matter to you and um many of our translation strings and the formatting of our language files have been adjusted to support uh integration with the localized internationalization platform so if you have custom language files you can just use the command line uh normalized language tool and it will uh bring everything up to spec but if you've overridden your strings might want to review the details in the change log to see if if any of the strings that you've overridden have been renamed or adjusted uh there aren't a whole lot but there's a a little list there finally uh some deprecations and removed features the viewfinder commmand search object class has been deprecated in favor of viewfinder commm abstract search object this has always been an abstract class it just seemed to uh be clearer to include abstract in the name for consistent see with other parts of the code so we uh we added it in a Backward compatib Compatible way in 9.1 we'll finish that Cleanup in 10.0 uh we also removed a few things because oclc discontinued some services without replacing them so the worldcat identities recommendation module is gone and the oclc identities autocomplete Handler is also gone uh if you use these in your configuration you won't encounter any errors but they'll just be silently ignored uh and finally there was a file in one of our themes called bootstrap custom.css uh which was basically an example of how you could override some things with CSS but we never used it and it was confusing people so we just deleted it and that's it so just a reminder of some resources uh if you are going to upgrade my recommended method is to do it using git and there's a video on how to upgrade viewfinders in git so you can can see the process that I use for all of my viewfinders uh and also there's this blog post about automatically updating local custom files with Git um this is the method I use to synchronize changes in the core code with uh custom templates it saves me a lot of time and trouble I encourage you to do this too if you have a lot of custom templates and that's it so if you have any questions or comments you can always reach out to me at the usual email address damian. cats villanova.edu or you can find me on The View find slack and that's it thank you very much