I am finally taking the time to write about optimizing the Solr schema file. In my last post I showed that eZ Find already ships with a default search field called ezf_df_text. The downside of searching one field is that field needs to be controlled, and the only way it can be controlled is by manually editing the Solr schema file. As you might expect, eZ Find does not control this file very well out of the box.

I have spent a good deal of my freetime this past month or two learning as much about about the php framework Symfony as possible. The moment that eZ Systems announced that they were adopting the Symfony framework I knew that I would be be spending some time with it. I have found that Symfony doesn’t have the lowest barrier to entry so it has been a process, to say the least. I have a blog that has helped matters a great deal and so I wanted to give it some props here. If you are like me, wanting to learn Symfony but lacking time and resources, you should really check this site out: Symblog: Creating a Blog in Symfony2

I recently updated to Skype 6 and found something interesting out. My style package that worked in Skype 5 would not work in Skype 6. With some digging, we found out that in order to make your Skype 5 style work in Skype 6 you need to update the MessageViewVersion to version 7 (I have no idea why). So, with that, have fun updating your Skype to the latest version while still getting use out of your favorite Skype theme.

Just had to share this post since I helped a little bit with it. Very handy little tip about authorizing security groups across AWS accounts.

AWS authorize security groups across acounts « ShellRunner.

It is a post by @jacksonmurtha so we can trust that it is good.

Let me start by saying that eZ Find is a fantastic implementation of Solr functionality. With eZ Find you get a fantastic search, out of the box. eZ Find gathers all the content in your system and organizes it for you into strings, text, and keywords (there are more but those the types I use most often). It can look at an eZ Publish keyword and know that it should thereby be a Solr keyword, again, all out of the box. There are however some serious limitations when it comes time to customize it to meet your system’s needs. Do not underestimate the power found in customizing Solr to meet your website’s needs. The default setup is great, it’s made to fit into any system with very little effort; but, just because it’s made to fit in any system does not mean that it should be used for every system.

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I have been a devout git user for as long as I have been programming. I was lucky enough to bypass subversion entirely, at least that is what my friends who’ve used svn have told me.

The cool thing about git is that it tracks changes, not files or directories. When I create a new empty directory that directory is not tracked by git because it has no file changes inside, hence, the directory will never make it into git until I add a file to that directory. For this example I am going to use the logs directory of a virtual site. In my logs directory I have two files, an error_log and an access_log. Apache error logs and access logs should never be tracked by version control because they are logs that are specific to the given system the site is installed on. However, we should try to track the logs directory in version control. As hinted at before, we can do this in one of two ways.

A while back I fell in love with Sublime Text 2 and its’ many advantages over TextMate. What it lacked however was any real support for the eZ Publish templating language (no different than TextMate). What I wanted was a simple editor that offered variable and method highlighting equivalent to a nice IDE like PHPStorm. I was originally using the Smarty package for TextMate (you can use any TextMate package in Sublime), but that does not offer a lot of method highlighting support for eZ. So what I decided to do was use the Smarty package as a template for adding more language support for eZ Publish. What I have is far from complete; I usually only add to it when I use a method that is not already supported. You can find it out on GitHub. It is my hope that there are some eZ Publish devs out there that really enjoy Sublime as I do and want to help me grow the package. Remember, it is far from complete, but nonetheless, I really hope that you enjoy the language highlighting, and if you do feel free to contribute.

I am way overdue on my promise to show you how to make shards work. As I said before, shards in eZ Find do not work out of the box. In the code the $shardQuery is built properly but the variable is never actually used after it is created. What I did to make this work is a simple if/else block inside the $queryHandler switch. I am not submitting this as a pull request to eZ Find at the moment just because I do not like the way I made this work, I feel like there is a better way to do it. Nevertheless here is my code to make Shards work, I hope you enjoy and moreover I hope you suggest a better way to make the code work ;)

Turns out that when using shards to search multiple cores (shards in general actually) binary is not returned properly. I found an update to the trunk (4.x) version of Solr and was successfully able to update my version of Solr 3.6. I am submitting a pull request of the code update to Solr as well a new war file to eZ Find, but in the meantime you can download the solr.war file on GitHub (it is in my eZ Find branch). Enjoy!