Apachesolr Views is back! and a couple other handy ApacheSolr mods

It’s been a while since we looked at Apachesolr Drupal integration.  In large part that is because it “just works.”

It's solr, in a view, with exposed filters, facets, and it brews tea!

With the recent release of new code on Apachesolr Views (Big ups to dstuart, Ravi.J and ygerasimov for the recent contributions… everything seems to be aces) it’s time to revisit the subject.

If you have struggled with theming the search-result.tpl.php file and really don’t want to learn any more about getting great faceted search results you are totlally in luck!  Note to all: we’re using views 3.x-dev, apachesolr 3.x-dev, and apachesolr_views 3.x-dev.

For those of you who are video inclined here’s a ~4 minute screencast

For the rest of you Robert Douglass called it over two years ago in his “views 3 + apachesolr + acquia drupal = the future of search” post and for the most part that’s the deal – if you want to see more screen shots go there.

We’re also using ApacheSolr Custom Fields and the Batch Indexing module (thanks anarchivist)  (as mentioned previously).  Note that at this time the custom field module requires this fix to run… but still a handy module.

Learn to not code with the help of nice mods!

Custom Fields is well worth the minor effort in that it is another piece of the no-coding puzzle.  We also enjoyed having views php (a bit of coding is ok – we used it to set up displays per content type in the view)

Also using better exposed filters again to make the UI for the exposed filter better… gotta love naming conventions!

In any case the working view took about 10-15 minutes to produce, with ~5 minutes spent making tea.

Attached below is our working stack in a zip file

if anyone wants to download the entire package that we’re using go ahead, there are a few known issues including taxonomy facets that still need to be patched in this release, however for many use cases it is good to go
 Solr Stack – Views + Apachesolr + Apachesolr Views + Batch Reindex + Custom Fields