Drupal Search has a great ecosystem of modules to integrate with technologies such as Solr. However, it needs more vision and direction to grow and be a great platform where other developers feel comfortable with and are able to make the right decisions. Also We are convinced that if we all come together and talk, get some decisions and actually get to work on a regular basis we can come up with a solution for Drupal that kicks a**! An example of the greatness showed earlier is the co-operation between the maintainers of Apache Solr and Search API to create a common solrconfig and schema so you take away the pain of having separate schemas for the modules and end up with frustrating as Solr can be quite daunting to set up.
So, that is why we decided to move forward with creating office hours for this aspect of Drupal.
Who is we you might ask?
- Peter Wolanin is a contributor to the search space in Drupal since the early days. He is the lead maintainer of the Apache Solr Search module.
- Chris Pliakas is the lead maintainer of the Facet API module. The Facet API module is integrated tightly with the Search API and the Apachesolr modules. Chris is super fascinated by the Search world and would love to see Drupal thrive in this space.
- Thomas Seidl is the lead maintainer of the Search API and the Search API Solr module. He started a whole new concept of Search in Drupal.
- Nick Veenhof is co-maintainer of the Apache Solr and Facet API modules and has plenty of other search contributions. He is also the owner of this blog ;-).
When?
We hold the Drupal Search/Solr contribution mentoring (“office hours”) every other week in #drupal-apachesolr on freenode:
- Wednesday, December 5th, 16:00 - 17:00 UTC convert this to my timezone
- Wednesday, December 19th, 16:00 - 17:00 UTC convert this to my timezone
- Wednesday, January 2th, 16:00 - 17:00 UTC convert this to my timezone
- many more after these three
(Calendar ID: n1dquvijhsdtchdpqdvcupk5ss@group.calendar.google.com)
You want to join?
You are free to join the channel at any time! If you want to get a notification in advance, sign up to join at http://groups.drupal.org/node/270638
Why mentoring?
There are a lot of people that want to help but don’t know how, these are the people we want to encoure to get involved. Also all the maintainers listed above feel we should talk more often then once a year on a Drupalcon to discuss the direction we are taking with these modules.
I hope to see you next Wednesday! We will be capturing the talks there and I will put them on my blog as an archive.