enterprise drupal solr search

The Drupal.org redesign team just released the results from their first major code sprint started in Portland, OR during OSCON in July.  This first release included a significant amount of infrastructure and under-the-hood implementation.  One of the visible portions of this sprint is the Solr search deployed by Achieve's CTO, Bill O'Connor (cveb10).  Achieve has been contributing code to Drupal.org redesign project since 2009. In 2010,  the Drupal Association made a strategic decision to hire five teams to complete the project.

The Drupal.org redesign team, including recently hired contractors, met in Portland last week to coordinate their efforts and generate a workable project plan.

Among the agreements in place are the scheduling of a development release on August 7th, and the planning of subsequent releases every two weeks after that until project completion.  Additionally, the team will be tracking issues in the public queues and meeting by phone three times each week.

For regular updates go to: http://groups.drupal.org/drupalorg-redesign-implementers 

The hiring of contractors was a difficult decision for the Drupal Association, but it was necessary in order to accelerate Drupal development and to enable the project team to appropriately address the highly complex technical issues involved in the redesign.

Achieve Internet is leading the Solr development portion of the project. Solr is a robust search platform used by many large Drupal web sites to improve search speed and capability. Solr works by housing an index of a site's Drupal data and arranging it for easy access via the Lucene Java search library.

Drupal.org is a huge site, with nearly a million pages, nearly a million users, and at least 8600 projects. Project manager Chris Strahl noted that this puts the Drupal.org redesign project on the same scale as some of the largest corporate website projects in the world.

The redesign goes far beyond aesthetic upgrades to include key functional improvements. The project module, for example, is evolving from a Drupal.org-specific tool to a true project management module with robust Views integration. Also, site searching will include the ability to search all *.drupal.org sites, so the information distributed in various areas (groups.drupal.org, for example) will be accessible via one search box. Add to this increased functionality the implications of the GIT migration, and it’s easy to see how significant this Drupal development effort is.

With such a huge project, no task is truly discrete, and sorting out some of the dependencies has been challenging.

For large Drupal deployments, performance is key. One way to improve site speed is to unload search functionality onto a dedicated platform, called Solr, that provides better performance and more options. Here are the top five reasons to integrate Solr with your Drupal site:

1. The White House did it!
2. Drupal and Solr have existing integration paths and modules to facilitate integration.
3. Drupal 7 is becoming even more integrated with Solr, especially the new version of Drupal’s popular and robust Views module which enables quick content access and configuration.
4. Solr is free and open source – It’s clean energy!
5. Solr is fast. The Java searching library speeds up search and can be housed on a different server, taking some of the load off your web server.
   

Contact us today to power your Drupal website searching with Solr.

Achieve Internet has been leading Solr development for the Drupal.org redesign for a while, and we were officially named lead Solr developer last week.
 
One general goal for the new site is to efficiently deliver useful and relevant content to the user. Technically, this involves several important tasks:

Top Five Reasons to Use Solr to Power Site Search
The content in your Drupal site must be accessible to visitors, and this makes robust searching a necessity. Solr, a popular open source search platform, can be integrated with Drupal to provide robust and fast site searching.
 
Here are five of the top features Solr offers:

1. faceting searching – filter searches on fields, including date ranges
2. settings to push certain content as results – useful if, for example, an eCommerce site wants products to appear higher on the results list
3. file content searching – allows for searching within .doc and other file types
4. configurable “related content” recommendation algorithm – Solr can find and select content that's appropriate for the user's context and profile
5. a rich set of site statistical tools – allows website administrators to review and report on the most popular queries, query response time, and etc.

 

Achieve Internet specializes in Drupal and Solr integration and customization to ensure that website content searching is fast and thorough. Solr is a popular search platform, due to its speed and features.
 
Here are five noteworthy public sites that use Solr to handle search:

1. WhiteHouse.gov – The Obama administration's keystone web site is Drupal and Solr!
2. Netflix – Solr powers basic movie searching on this extremely busy site.
3. Internet Archive – Search this vast repository of music, documents and video using Solr.
4. StubHub.com – This ticket reseller uses Solr to help visitors search for concerts and sporting events.
5. The Smithsonian Institution – Search the Smithsonian’s collection of over 4 million items.

 
See a longer list here and contact us today to power your Drupal website searching with Solr.
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An All New Drupal.org
Drupal’s web site is the hub of the Drupal community. Developers, business owners, CTOs, and curiosity seekers visit the site for core software downloads, add-on modules, support forums, documentation, news, and more. Drupal.org bustles with activity, and since it’s the face Drupal presents to the world, speed, capacity, cutting-edge look-and-feel, and impressive functionality are all important.

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).