We had another Drupal Search and Solr office hours. This time mkalkbrenner came to us with a list of issues that he really wanted to see resolved as he already applied them in production.

His use case was a (pay attention!) Drupal site with the following features

• Multilanguage (node translation, entity translation. Of course not the both in 1 site. He had two sites, each one with a different translation method)
• Cross Site Search (1 or more Drupal sites, could be Drupal 6 or 7, that have the same solr index)
• Multi Solr indexes per Site, also Cross Site Search enabled
• Support for Dev/Staging/Production stages by means of dragging and dropping the database (so everything needs to be exportable)

The list of issues he had to overcome with the Apache Solr Search Integration Module in combination with the Apache Solr Multilingual Module are listed here. You can see it was quite a lot.

• node reference with multiple values
• Unable to index a node bundle in a dedicated index / environment
• Complete admin settings for non-default environments
• avoid multiple identical values in multi value fields
• Solr query needs to be aware of more context such as Search Page ID
• Allow contrib modules to add custom settings to search pages
• Devel integration: debug index documents on all environments / indexes *Integrate Apache Solr Common Configurations for Solr 3.x and 4.x (Highlighting broken)
• missing highlighted snippets
• Avoid spaces between words and punctution marks in search result snippets

I’m happy to say that after an hour of work we solved some of these issues, but we went even further and spent another 4 hours together to fix all of the above issues. Now Markus does not need to patch the module anymore to achieve what he wants. I highly recommend you to take a look at the multilingual Solr module as it has loads of really cool features that make a multilingual search awesome. Thank Acquia for sponsoring my time to allow me to give back to the community!

I’d like to invite you to come to the next Drupal Search office hours. The topic is general Search so not just these modules. It will take place in two weeks, the 27th March 2013