Heard good things about Search API but haven’t had time to set it up? Have experience with ApacheSolr module but rely on hosted Solr? Wish you could develop locally on your own local Solr instance? Want a tour of all the power and possibilities Search API can provide for your sites?
Search API module provides a powerful framework that lets you integrate your site with search backends like ApacheSolr and build out searchable interfaces of any Drupal entity with Views. Want a fully searchable user directory, a faceted sitewide search, or search-based related content panes? These can all be built with Views.
We have developed open source tools which make setting up ApacheSolr instances and Search API configurations trivial. I’ll walk you through setting up and introduce you to these tools at the beginning of the training, ensuring everyone quickly has a working ApacheSolr instance on a local sandbox site. Then we’ll build Views with Search API, and add and configure facets with Facet API. We’ll use drush to work with with the search index. Finally we’ll look at how you can improve search results relevancy and add custom fields to the index with a custom module. I’ll show you sites I’ve built with Search API including searchable maps, stores, and video libraries.
Learning Objectives
After this training students should be able to build powerful Solr-based interfaces without writing code. They should also be able to run Solr to any of their sites on their local machine and on servers they control.
We will provide a training manual.
Syllabus
Class begins at 09:00, lunch is at 11:45, class ends at 17:00.
Who will gain the most from this course?
Drupal site builders and developers who use Solr on Pantheon or Acquia hosting but do not have a local instance for development.
Drupal site builders and developers who currently use core search, Google search, or the Drupal ApacheSolr module (rather than Search API) for their projects.
Prerequisites for this course
You should have experience with Drupal 7 site building with Views and be comfortable at the command line.