Apache Solr Search

You're probably reading this blog post right now from Drupal Planet. We all know that Drupal Planet is an amazing resource: we use it to keep up with the latest developments in Drupal, find tutorials, and stay connected with the community. However, the limitations of Drupal Planet can be frustrating. During my first month working at Evolving Web, I helped develop an alternative user interface for finding Drupal Planet content called Drupal Sun, which we're launching today.

Drupal and ApacheSolr are a great combination. Drupal provides the infrastructure for managing content, taxonomies, and users. Solr provides a scalable search index, allowing for results to be dynamically faceted so users can narrow down their results.

Evolving Web had an awesome time at Drupal Design Camp this weekend. It was a great success with hundreds of Drupal designers, themers, developers, and site builders in attendance from the northeastern states and beyond.

The McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), is one of the most comprehensive university health centres in North America. It includes a network of five major hospitals and is both a patient and research-oriented organization.

Recently, I've been working on the search interface for McGill University's course catalog. The University wants to allow students to browse courses at friendly URLs like:

Creating a search interface for a website with a lot of content requires providing a variety of filters. Sometimes those filters can take on a life of their own, providing hundreds of options for users to filter by. While building widgets for our Drupal/Solr projects, we looked at a couple non-Drupal examples of search interfaces for content-heavy websites.