While I was at DrupalCon last week, Chris Pliakas sent a tweet out that he used screenshots from CMS Report in his Apache Lucene presentation. I'm always flattered when this site gets noticed for something we're apparently doing right. In this particular case, we're using the contributed Drupal module Search Lucene API for our search engine as well as for faceted search and content recommendations (recommended links).
If you had talked to me a few years ago, I would have told you that the Search module that comes with the Drupal CMS is all a site like mine needs. After I became a beta tester for the Acquia Network along with their implementation of Apache Solr called Acquia Search, my opinion quickly changed. I'm now convinced that an enterprise quality search engine is truly something that can make or break your website. If you're a smaller Drupal site that feels like Solr or Acquia Search is overkill or not in your cost range, Search Lucene API may be the answer you've been looking for all this time.
The actual name of Chris' DrupalCon presentation is: "Build a Powerful Site Search with the User-Friendly, Easy-to-Install Search Lucene API Module Suite". The video of his presentation can be viewed at Archive.org and has been embedded above. Screenshots from CMSReport.com can be seen in the time frame from 19 minutes to 21 minutes.
The video covers the following topics:
- Introducing the technology and capabilities of Lucene at a high level
- Installing and configuring Search Lucene API to index and search your site’s content
- Configuring faceted search using the core Search Lucene Facets module
- Adding spelling suggestions based on the terms in the index using the Search Lucene DidYou Mean module
- Displaying content recommendations based on the text and metadata of the node being viewed using the Search Lucene MoreLikeThis module
- Localizing the site search using the Search Lucene Internationalization project
- Indexing CCK fields and exposing them as facets using the Search Lucene CCK and Search Lucene Facet Builder modules
This article first appeared on CMS Report.