Building amazing searches with Search API

A quick, hands-on walk through the Search API ecosystem in Drupal 8: How to set things up, what you can do, what to keep in mind, what to avoid.
Make your site search amazing, too!

What's the Search API?

First created for Drupal 7, the Search API module provides a powerful, extensible framework for creating searches in Drupal. Along with its numerous extension modules it allows site builders to enrich their searches with any number of advanced features, and vastly improve the relevancy and presentation of the delivered results compared to the default "Search" module provided with Drupal Core.

While not all of the extension modules have been ported to Drupal 8 yet, the Search API itself and several other modules working with it are already usable or even considered stable – enough to make amazing searches in Drupal 8, too!

What to expect

While this session will also include some background information, it will mainly consist of a live demonstration of how to set up the Search API with various extension modules, of the kind of searches and functionality you can create with those, and also contain some tips and warnings that might be helpful when using this modules on your own site.

Covered modules will include:

• Search API (duh)
• Search API Solr Search
• Search API Multilingual Solr Search
• Search API Autocomplete
• Facets
• Possibly others (depending, mostly, on their development status at the time)

If you want to get a more accurate feel of what to expect, check out one of my previous Search API demo sessions, like the one from DrupalCon Barcelona (2015). It will basically follow the same pattern, just updated to the latest developments in the Drupal 8 version (which have been numerous).

Required knowledge

This session is aimed at beginners, no knowledge about any of the discussed modules is required. However, it will be helpful to already be somewhat familiar with Drupal 8 and the "Views" module.

Who we are

Thomas Seidl (drunken monkey) is the initial creator of the Search API and a lot of its extension modules, and continues to maintain most of them. He's been working on search modules in Drupal since 2008.

Markus Kalkbrenner (mkalkbrenner) is the maintainer of the Search API Solr backend(s) in Drupal 8. He started with Solr before their 1.0 release and has been working on its Drupal integration since Drupal 5.