"Live from Minnesota", Drupal Search Sprint 2008
Just winding down now from a long day of thinking about and working on Drupal search, I thought I spend five minutes jotting down a few impressions.
The People
Robert Douglass, Blake Lucchesi, Djun Kim, David Lesieur, Earnest Berry, and Doug Green and Yours TrulyI'm almost starting to take for granted the fact that Drupal will be sending the University of Minnesota Libraries a handful of authentically brilliant and unusually good-natured developers to visit, this being our second high-profile Drupal project. But yeah, we're "Live from Minnesota" as Doug Green points out (I like the meme, no doubt).
The Work
Like a lot of efforts underway in Drupal, search is moving towards a more extensible model by way of a core API. This shift has me excited for a number of reasons, but mostly due to my interest in the Drupal/Solr combo within the context of academic research environments. By decoupling the search and indexing processes from a specific database implementation, we open the door to a whole new ecosystem of search utilities.If all goes well with the new search API, I believe it won't be long before we start seeing c|net style faceted drill-down e-commerce sites in Drupal. We already have a well laid-out Apache Solr Module, but a search API will provide more granular control, better integration with core search and ease the long-term burden of maintenance on Robert by moving portions of his code into core.
Personally, this is a chance for me to really think deeply about how to best harness the wonderful work of Doug Green and others within the context of core search features, especially as regards Solr integration. On an even more practical level, this is my own little unit testing bootcamp as I help to write tests for the work being done here this weekend.
Off to bed and on to day two.
