Blacklight Futures - Planning for the future

[Justin Coyne]

I wanted to report out to the broader community about a session on Blacklight planning/roadmapping that was held at Stanford today.

Some of the goals we identified for the future were:

• Greater community involvement
• responding to adversarial internet (bots)
• Matching UI patterns with widely used patterns ("OR" facets)
• Improving search capabilities
• Anticipating upcoming design changes (bootstrap 6)
• Mitigating risk in open source communities (Ruby on Rails, Ruby itself)

Some of the strategies we identified to meet these goals:

• Keeping dependencies updated
• Adding semantic search or MCP (possibly as plugins)
• Simplify development through clearer code contracts
• Move facets into a drawer, so they don't have to be rendered unless they will be used.
• rename repository to blacklight-rails, in case someone should want to develop something like blacklight-phoenix.

Keeping the dependencies up to date was determined to be a high ongoing priority.  Adding semantic search and/or MCP is likely to be emerging as a medium priority. 

Regards,

Justin Coyne