Last week we looked at ways to get content from Drupal into Solr for indexing. This week we continue our series Improving Drupal's Search with Apache Solr and Search API by looking at ways to query Solr with a keyword, or set of keywords, and display the returned results in Drupal. The Search API module doesn't provide this functionality on its own, but rather allows additional modules to build on the API it provides to allow for a variety of different display options. We'll look at using the Search API Pages module to replace the functionality of the core search module. And then we'll also look at using the Views module to retrieve search results.
In addition to displaying results we'll take a more in-depth look at our Search API index configuration and:
- Add some extra fields to the index that were not there before so we can search on their content
- Use boosting to influence the relevancy of a keyword depending on the field that it's located in when searching
- Talk about the Search API module's data alterations and processors which allow for additional data manipulation before sending content to Solr for indexing, or when displaying results, allowing us to further customize what is indexed, and how it is displayed.
Tutorials for this week include:
- Display Results With Search API Pages
- Add Fields and Assign Boost Values
- Data Alterations and Processors (FREE)
- Display Search Results With Search API Views
Next week we'll wrap up this series on integrating Solr with Drupal 7 via the Search API module by taking a look a how to implemented faceted searches, and a whole bunch of configuration options we can tweak within our Solr configuration in order to help provide better search results for our users.
Add new comment