Brainstorming for my DrupalCon session [#1555808]

I hope to speak at the upcoming DrupalCon in Munich – please cross your fingers that it works this time!

Apart from your support to get this session in (even though it's not primarily aimed at current users, there is sure to be something useful in there for most of you, too) I'd love some help in selecting the advanced topics I'll discuss:

What common advanced use cases should I discuss?
What pitfalls did you encounter that you wish you'd known about before?
What other tips should I give to Search API newbies?
Or: What arguments are best suited to sell the Search API to site builders unfamiliar with it?

Your help would be much appreciated!

Comments

Comment #1

ericmulder1980 CreditAttribution: ericmulder1980 commented 21 June 2012 at 08:39

Hi Thomas,

If you are planning to create a session for beginners than i guess you could best skip the advanced use cases. To be honoust, if people are really interested in search API than the module page and shipped documentation should be more than enough to get beginners started. Why not aim at the more experienced Drupal users?

If you will be aiming at beginners i would begin with explaining the concept of search api. It's a layer between Drupal and the backend and the apachesolr module does both. Offcourse i don't have to explain this to you ;) Then you could do some basic examples with creating an index in the mysql database and then switching it to Apache Solr. You could explain the differences in the supported backends. Then you could explain (live demo) the different ways to view search results, search_page and Views and tell a little about facets perhaps? I don't know exactly how much time you have but i guess that would fill up your time quite nicely.

If you are aiming at the more advanced public than perhaps i can convince you to look at my current use case ;) On a lot of bigger projects there is a need to integrate external datasources into Drupal. This data needs to be available in Drupal but cannot be stored in Drupal. For example this can be an external datasource containing collection data for a museum, there are more applications thinkable. You would want to view the collection items, let contrib modules interact with the collection item (something like 'rating') and offcourse (and that is where search api comes in) search trough the collection items.

So for more advanced users it would be nice to know how you can create your own custom backend (service and datasource) and make results available in Drupal.

No mather what you decide to use, i'll be at DrupalCon to shake your hand ;)

Comment #2

drunken monkey

he/him

German

Vienna, Austria

CreditAttribution: drunken monkey commented 8 July 2012 at 23:10

If you will be aiming at beginners i would begin with explaining the concept of search api. It's a layer between Drupal and the backend and the apachesolr module does both. Offcourse i don't have to explain this to you ;) Then you could do some basic examples with creating an index in the mysql database and then switching it to Apache Solr. You could explain the differences in the supported backends. Then you could explain (live demo) the different ways to view search results, search_page and Views and tell a little about facets perhaps? I don't know exactly how much time you have but i guess that would fill up your time quite nicely.

Yes, currently that's about the plan (but without talking about the Database search more than a few sentences). I won't do a live demo, as that's strongly discouraged, but I will have abundant amounts of screenshots which, I hope, will be just as good.
And you are probably right that this will take most of my time anyways, so there might not be much need for further things to discuss … We only get 45 minutes, of which we should reserve five to ten for questions at the end. Also, Yuriy Gerasimov will talk about the Facet API a bit more in detail, so that will take some time, too.

Comment #3

dynamicdan CreditAttribution: dynamicdan commented 21 August 2012 at 11:57

Bit late but maybe you get it?

Common pitfall...
Dates in the past... like prehistoric (before UTC 0) don't work. I had to store day, month and year in separate fields because the year 50 didn't really work with a date field (at least in the last year of the search_api).

Advanced scenario:
Hierarchical location based taxonomy. Searching for 'Munich' (full text) should match on items tagged with 'munich' and include results from the parent taxonomy item 'Germany'.