Since the release of Drupal 7, the Search API module (along with its numerous extensions) has been providing a new, flexible way of creating searches in Drupal. It was considered as a model for core search in Drupal 8 at some point and is now used on Drupal.org for issue queue searches. However, as it was designed almost from scratch for Drupal 7, numerous shortcomings were identified in its architecture since its creation. Some of these shortcomings could be (more or less cleanly) patched or at least worked around, but it still contains a number of limitations that make it less flexible than it could be, and too inflexible for some tasks. Some of these shortcomings even lead to very hard-to-fix UX issues in the module.

While of course the module's Drupal 7 version continues to be worked on to remove or mitigate these issues, Drupal 8 and the module overhaul necessitated (or at least facilitated) by its coming finally provide the chance to fix some of these fundamental shortcomings right at their roots, by improving the framework in ways that aim to perfect its principle of flexibility and finally make it the go-to solution for all advanced search use cases in Drupal. Some of these use cases could be seen in a presentation that was already given earlier this year (www.slideshare.net/nickvh/search-api-d8). This also enables the consolidation of the two Apache Solr modules (Search API Solr & Apache Solr Search.) by removing existing complications in this endeavor. And as such, we'll also talk shortly about the efforts that were done for Search API Solr in Drupal 8 and Elastic Search for Search API D8.

In this presentation we will start by giving a short introduction into the basic ideas of Search API's architecture and then go on to discuss the changes that were carried out during the year. We will talk what initiatives were executed, such as a couple of sprints, how the drupalfund.us money was used and how and why we started porting early. With some luck and your help we will be able to show you a fairly stable Search API D8.

Since the Search API is a rather complex module, using a lot of Drupal's more advanced development features, the presentation will also give a good insight into some of Drupal core's changes in this area – Drupal 8's more refined Entity API, the new plugin system in core, some advanced features of the new configuration management, etc. (Part of this can also be read in drunken monkey's D8 upgrade blog post series. http://drunkenmonkey.at/blog/search-api-d8-update-part-1 and http://drunkenmonkey.at/blog/search-api-d8-update-part-2)

Required prior knowledge
This is an intermediate/advanced session. We will require you to know at least the basic concepts of Drupal but will guide you along the limitations of what we used to have and what will come in Drupal 8.

Previous presentations and resources
Drupaljam April 2014 - www.slideshare.net/nickvh/search-api-d8
Drupal Dev Days 2014 - http://szeged2014.drupaldays.org/program/sessions/search-api-drupal-8
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