You're building a site - and you think it's almost done. Then, you get the request: "users cannot find the content - we need to add a great search experience too".

Would you know what to do? Can you pick the best combination of modules, configure them and deliver highly relevant search results combined with using drill-down search filtering links as primary site navigation?

In this lab we will go from a Drupal site with content but no search in a semi-continuous demo to a fully functional website that is using faceted search (drill-down links) powered by Apache Solr as its primary navigation.

Topics:

What is Apache Solr and why and when should you use it.
Pros and cons of using Apache Solr Search Integration vs. Search API Solr.
Making sure your data is in the index and creating an initial search page using Solr.
Configure the relevancy of search results and additional options for changing relevancy.
Enabling Facet API and adding facets
Options for configuring the facets for different and changing their display.
Creating a search page just for finding users.
Indexing files such as PDF or DOCX
Autocomplete search
Options for changing and enhancing the display of your search results.
Through it all we will give you the caveats and guidance on the maturity and performance of existing modules and the impact of configuration options.

We assume you will have a Apache Solr server set up locally at the start (see this quick start) so you can follow along each step in your local environment, but will provide a little help at the beginning if you don't have it running yet.

The major part of the presentation will be module configuration, with some examples of custom coding at the end such as to demonstrate how to index and retrieve arbitrary additional data.