One of the greatest things about eZ Publish as a CMS is its ability to host many websites (siteaccesses) in one eZ Publish install. Recently I had the privilege of working on an eZ install that hosted 4 websites, giving the illusion of a single site experience across multiple urls. We used eZ Find extensively, specifically its multi-core functionality, to get information across the sites with ease. That way, all the sites can keep and maintain their own databases, and what is shared is shared through Solr.

Alright, so lets begin installing eZ Find by going out and downloading it from the Github => https://github.com/ezsystems/ezfind. eZ Find is an eZ Publish extension so: unzip the download, rename the fold “ezfind,” and then move the ezfind folder to the extensions directory of your eZ Publish install.

So, as with any extension, we have to activate it. Go into your override site.ini.append.php (settings/override/site.ini.append.php) and add ezfind to your active extension list (ActiveExtensions[]=ezfind). I added mine just after my main site extension. Easy enough so far right?

As you had probably already guessed, eZ Find will not without first setting up Solr. Luckily eZ Find comes with the recommended version of Solr for eZ Find. Within the eZ Find extension you should see a java directory (remember Solr is written in Java?). So what we need to do is copy the java directory and move it to the htdocs level of your eZ Publish install and rename the folder “Solr” (see the image on the right). There is a lot in the solr directory that we will not need to mess with right now, specifically I will not cover the multicore options right now, just know that eZ Find can run multiple sites/cores on one Solr install. Also note that I just installed Solr locally, but it can also be installed on remote servers.