Update on plans for AtoM 2.9
Sarah Romkey
Dear AtoM community users,
We at Artefactual wanted to give you all an update on our progress with AtoM 2.9 and beyond.
As we reported last year, AtoM has a number of major dependency and OS upgrades needed. As our Maintainers began investigation and work, it became clear that the Elasticsearch replacement should become the priority, as many other dependencies and libraries will depend on what Elasticsearch is replaced with. As the Elasticsearch work has gotten underway, it is clear to us that it is a large enough change that it should be handled in its own release. The chosen replacement is Solr, an open-source search tool with a long and stable history.
In summary, AtoM 2.9 will only address critical bug fixes as well as replace Elasticsearch with Solr. All further dependency updates previously mentioned (php, MySql, Ubuntu 22.04 and Rocky Linux 9) will wait for a further release. We will also delay removing Bootstrap 2.x until AtoM 2.10 (although as of 2.8.x it is considered to be deprecated, meaning we have not been testing it).
Prior to releasing AtoM 2.9, we will be preparing a beta release for testing. We would be most appreciative if institutions who have a testing site available to them would install the beta release and give us their feedback. Details on how to do so will be announced with the beta release.
Thank you for your attention!
