Solr Searching on Drupal.org

Advanced Faceted Searching on Drupal.org

Like many in the Drupal community I'm anxiously awaiting the new Drupal.org redesign. So much so, several months ago I jumped at the chance to contribute on the development team. We're making significant progress, and have a sprint scheduled for March 19th, 8am – noon PST (IRC channel #drupal-infrastructure).

One of the functional improvements of the new site, and the one I'm involved in, will be site searching. I'd guess that a lot of us Drupalers have spent many hours (too many, perhaps) browsing through themes and modules, trying to find what we need. The search capabilities on the existing Drupal.org allow for some filtering of search results, but the new site will feature advanced faceted searching, which should save us all a lot of time.

In themes, for example, you'll be able to filter results based on number of columns, fixed-or-fluid layout, and screen resolution. Filtering categories will be available in other ares of the site, including modules. From a user perspective, the filtering will work the way it does on a site like BestBuy.com, where you can search for a laptop, for example, then narrow your results by price, screen size, memory, OS, etc.

Although I initially volunteered the Achieve Internet team to help with just the theming side of searching, my role has evolved to the point where I'm a project manager/technical lead for the search results sections of the new site. This means I'll be making sure that Drupal content types are set up to enable faceted searching and also configuring Solr to index the appropriate fields.

At Achieve, we've done a lot of Solr Search work for clients, so I'm happy to lend my expertise to Drupal.org. And it's always nice to get mentioned on the Drupal home page. The goal is to have the new site go live around the time of DrupalCon San Francisco. There's a lot of work to do, but it should be a huge upgrade and I think it'll help everyone who works with, and on, Drupal. More to come – I'll do my best to keep up the updates!