DrupalCon Sydney 2013: Search All the Things

This session will walk you through the power of Drupal and Solr. Solr is a powerful tool that can be used to index content both in and out of Drupal. In this session we will walk through a typical use case of larger organizations which involves gathering documentation in many different formats and sources and exposing them in a way that is useful to users. As a bonus, this session will show you a legitimate use case and example of implementing Ruby in a Drupal module. In essence, I will show you what we accomplished in Drupal in less than 24 hours.

Intended Audience
This session is well suited for Drupal and non-Drupal developers interested in leveraging the power of Solr or other technologies in their work. It will walk through the Drupal components as well as show how to use Ruby in Drupal code. This will also appeal to developers wanting to get started in DevOps and will introduce you to Jenkins.

Prerequisites
You will get the most benefit out of this session if you understand the basics of D7 Stream Wrappers, Solr and Drush. You do not need an advanced understanding of these concepts, but the more you understand in advance the easier it will be to get the most from this session

Topics covered
Create a Jenkins job to checkout a series of git repos, copy docs and build RDoc and Github rendered markdown.
The basics of LDAP authentication to allow for larger organizations to authenticate with a site.
A simple private files mechanism to serve generated API docs from outside the docroot to logged in users.
Custom stream wrappers to simplify access to files that were generated or copied from our git repos.
Scanning the generated and git files and to look for additions, changes, or deletions.
A custom indexing loop to analyze html and send the content to Solr.
Shelling out to a ruby script to render github flavored markdown to HTML.
Drush commands to test and run things from the command line
Create a custom search facet for 'api source'.
You can read more about this work at http://www.acquia.com/blog/finding-all-things-engineering-hackathon

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