CivicActions

In the spirit of the "Data Sprint," and the "Testing Sprint", Friday 5/9 through Sunday 5/11, we are meeting in what is being dubbed the "Search Sprint" at the University of Minnesota.

The good news is that CivicActions is busy! The bad news is that I had hoped to prepare more, but this date has really snuck up on me. My plane leaves tomorrow, and I've neglected preparing at all. I was asked to write this blog several weeks ago (sorry).

This weekend is mostly an opportunity to rethink and refactor Drupal's core search. We'll try to unravel how search, node, and user module interact. The goal is to to provide the same great core search, but also to open up Drupal's search so that contrib can implement new search engines such as Lucene or SOLR.

There are also several floundering search patches, that we should look at. My favorite is the search node rank patch. This patch would allow, for example, voting api could be extend the search score so that nodes that are highly ranked are displayed higher in the search rankings.

I've been interested in Drupal searching for a little over a year now. I presented views-filterblock (VFB) and views-fastsearch (VFS) at OS/CMS Sunnyvalle 2007. I presented on Drupal core search at DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. Before, during and after Barcelona, I worked on the Drupal search patch that eventually made it into Drupal 6.x. In Boston we had a BoF where we discussed both UI (the faceted search interface) and the backend (Solr). It seems like only yesterday, but that's now been two months. And it's time to get back to work!

I look forward to seeing the everyone on "the search team," and we're sure to have more reports very soon... Stay tuned!

My thanks to Robert Douglas for spearheading this effort!