Drupal

This weekend I'll be attending DrupalCamp NYC 4. It is a no-holds-bars discussion, workshop/code-a-thon involving the open source content management system Drupal.

I look forward to meeting other local Drupal aficionados and meeting people and making new friends. If you see me please stop and say Hello.

I recently became very interested in using Apache Solr to provide fast, powerful, search for Drupal installations. That is I'm looking for better ways for a site to search its own (internal node) content and related documents from uploads and related databases and systems.

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat.

In learning more about that approach I've come acros several interesting modules that anyone interested in improving Drupal search may want to investigate further.

This is a very incomplete list of those search related modules. I have not used some of these modules and am not necessarily recommending them. I just want to point them out to anyone else interested in search issues with Drupal. If there are any I have missed or really should know about let me know.

Improving Search within Drupal

Core Searches - provides two contentsearch and usersearch modules allowing you to turn content or user search off, if you don't want to have them.

Faceted Search - provides faceted search results for core search. Check out the cool faceted search demo by David Lesieur.

Multisite Search - allows any one of your Drupal sites to search all of your Drupal sites.

Google Search and Google Custom Search - provide search integration with Google to search the current and multiple sites.

Solr - handles integration with Solr and/but is a replacement for the core search.module.

Apache Solr Search Integration - handles integration with Solr does not replace the core search module, provides faceted search and works with core searches.

Swish-E Indexer The Swish-E Indexer module is an implementation of of the open source Swish-E Search Engine a fast, flexible, and free open source system for indexing collections of Web pages or other files.

Any others I need to know about? Have experience using any of these? Let us know.

At Drupalcon Boston 2008 the folks of PingVision gave a fantastic presentation outlining their development of the Popular Science website.

They have also posted a thorough overview of the technical details as a Drupal case study at Drupal.org. This is a must read for anyone interested in learning about the capabilities of Drupal.

Ric Shreves has a new book "Drupal 5 Themes" which is particularly
useful for someone with some knowledge of web design (HTML, CSS, etc)
who looking to get an excellent and concise introduction to and
overview of theming and the theming architecture in Drupal 5.

It starts with a discussion of what a theme and templates are and
covers topics such as installing new themes, configuring site info and
block management.

It then has a great overview of Drupal theming conventions, templating
and a description of the files you may need to change and methods you
may need to override to tweak an existing theme.

It finishes up covering building your own theme from scratch using
PHPTemplate and pure PHP and dealing with forms.

One little gotcha is that it covers creating a theme based on the Zen
theme and uses the traditional copy and rename procedure. However,
and we all have to realize that it is impossible to produce a truly up
to date book, the Zen theme was recently updated so that you can make
sub themes really easily making much of the "copy and rename" not
necessary. This may confuse a newbie who downloads the latest version

Drupal 5 Themes author: Ric Shreves asin: 1847191827

We are going to be in Boston for the Drupalcon 2008 Conference. We've already registered and made hotel reservations. If you are going to be there make sure to say hi.