State of Search, Solr and Facets in Drupal 8

In this session I'll give you an overview what changed so far in Drupal 8 in regards to the Search eco-system. We will talk about Search API, Apache Solr, Facet API and Elastic Search.

I started out as an intern that had a task to improve the Apache Solr Module for Drupal 7 and get it stable. This was around the time that Drupal 7 was released and the contributed modules were way behind. This was more or less 5 years ago. After that internship I stayed very focussed on the Search ecosystem and over the course of the last 3 years I've been involved in how Search in Drupal 8 should take form and what needed to change to merge the Apache Solr module with the Search API Solr module. In this presentation I hope to give you some guidance what is still pending and what already was done.

This is a site-building session but it will involve some coding concepts as some of the terminologies within the ecosystem changed. We will also go in-depth in how we are now using views to build search pages, how facets work so that they do not break the stateless principles that blocks have to have in Drupal 8.

The session wil be led by use-cases and how to solve them in Drupal 8. These use-cases go from simple search pages to complex external data source indexing and showing them in Drupal.

I will also explain how we have gotten these complex modules ported within the community, with the help of a whole lot of volunteers. Without these amazing volunteers it wouldn't have happened. Hopefully I can tell you a couple of things that can help spark interest with others so this module that you really want to see improved or ported can get there with the help of volunteers.

And naturally, I will also explain my vision of where Search in Drupal should go towards and what we still need to do to get there!

Depending on the audience we can go really in-depth or stay general. Please let me know in advance what you expect from this session so I can tailor it to your needs!