solr

For some time, Solr 3.x and Drupal 7 have been able to do geospatial search (using the location module, geofield, or other modules that stored latitude and longitude coordinates in Drupal that could be indexed by Apache Solr). Life was good—as long as you only had one location per node!

Sometimes, you may have a node (say a product, or a personality) affiliated with multiple locations. Perhaps you have a hammer that's available in three of your company's stores, or a speaker who is available to speak in two locations. When solr 3.x and Drupal 7 encountered this situation, you would either use a single location value in the index (so the second, third, etc. fields weren't indexed or searched), or if you put multiple values into solr's search index using the LatLonType, solr could throw out unexpected results (sometimes combining the closest latitude and closest longitude to a given point, meaning you get strange search results).

Using one Apache Solr search core with more than one Drupal website isn't too difficult; you simply use a module like Apache Solr Multisite Search, or a technique like the one mentioned in Nick Veenhof's post, Let's talk Apache Solr Multisite. This kind of technique can save you time (and even money!) so you can use one Hosted Apache Solr subscription with multiple sites. The only caveat: any site using the solr core could see any other site's content (which shouldn't be a problem if you control all the sites and don't expose private data through solr).

There are two ways to make Apache Solr Search Integration work with Domain Access (one of which works similarly to the methods mentioned above for multisite), and which method you use depends on how your site's content is structured.

Midwestern Mac has been offering Apache Solr hosting for Drupal websites for the past three years, but this service has never been given too much attention or made easy to sign up for and use—until now!

Today we're announcing the re-launch of our service with a new website: Hosted Apache Solr.

The website was built on Drupal 7, and uses a custom base theme shared with Server Check.in (our server monitoring service built with Drupal and Node.js). We built a small payment integration module for PayPal subscriptions (though we're considering using Drupal Commerce, so we can use different payment processors more easily), and have built a very simple to use front-end for managing Solr core subscriptions.

I've helped many people set up or fix a botched install of Apache Solr on their VPSes and web servers. Most of the time, I've noticed that people leave the administrative frontend to Solr wide open for anybody on the internet to access, by just accessing http://example.com:8983/solr. This is very dangerous, as not only can anyone browse and query your search indexes, they can even add, delete, or change your search cores, and see sensitive system information that can be used to gain further access!

The Apache Solr admin dashboard

Some random bits of news from Midwestern Mac, LLC:

St. Louis-area Drupal Group

After taking a hiatus for the month of December, the St. Louis area Drupal Group will be meeting up (hopefully) on the third Thursday of the month as normal. We're hoping to have more structure to our meetups, and there are already some great ideas for meeting topics in 2013.

If you live in or around St. Louis and use or contribute to Drupal, please make an effort to join us and build up the Drupal community here in St. Louis!

As an aside, we still have a separate website for the St. Louis Drupal group—if anyone has ideas for how we can use that to spread the Drupal love in the center of the U.S., please let us know!

Server Check.in Launched

A couple weeks ago, we (Midwestern Mac, LLC) announced our newest service, Server Check.in, a website and server monitoring service that checks on your sites and servers every 10 minutes, notifying you of any problems. The service runs on Drupal, and integrates with services like Twilio and Stripe to handle SMS messaging and payments, respectively.

I (geerlingguy) wrote up a case study for Server Check.in and posted it to the Community showcase on drupal.org. This is the first application-type service built on by Midwestern Mac on Drupal, and we've already been hard at work improving the service.

If you have any questions about Server Check.in, or how it was built, please ask away; I had a great discussion with some other developers in this thread on Hacker News.

Hosted Apache Solr Search updated to 3.6.x

At the request of many people who wanted to do some neat new things with Solr on their Drupal sites, we've finally followed Acquia's lead and updated some of our Solr search servers to 3.6.x, meaning things like Location-based searching are now possible. And our servers are happier :)

For a while (earlier in my Drupal career), I was avoiding adding imagefield-attached images to nodes that appeared in my search results, because I remember the first time I tried doing so, I was still quite confused by the way drupal handled search results theming.

Well, after another crack at it, I finally have a nice, performant way of displaying images from nodes added via imagefields (or in drupal 7, image fields) inline with search results, and it didn't require much work at all!

The image above shows inline images for LOLSaints.com, a site which uses Midwestern Mac's Hosted Apache Solr search service to return results quickly and allows faceting, etc. using the excellent Apache Solr Search Integration module. But the technique I'm using works equally well with built-in (but slower) Drupal core search module's results.