VuFind Documentation

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====== Video Changelog: VuFind® 9.1: What's New / What's Changed ======

This recording, from the [[community_call:minutes20231003|October 3, 2023 Community Call]], highlights new features and significant changes in the VuFind® 9.1 release.

Video is available as an [[https://vufind.org/video/changelog9.1.mp4|mp4 download]] or through [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFeZci1pIGw&feature=youtu.be|YouTube]].

===== Transcript =====

// 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