I have been thinking a long time about different topics I could use this blog for. I have settled for the moment on an eZ Publish extension that I have used extensively for a while, eZ Find. eZ Find is an ultra-powerful Solr powered search engine made for eZ Publish, authored by Paul Borgermans.
For starters, an introduction to eZ Find & Solr.
Solr is an ultra-powerful search engine built in Java on top of the Apache Lucene project. It is highly scalable, just like eZ Publish, and can be adapted to work in almost any environment. eZ Find for instance uses a php interface with Solr to perform extremely fast and reliable searches.
eZ Find is a standalone extension that can be installed eZ Publish with great ease (my next post). eZ Find can be found in a couple of different places. First, on the eZ Publish Share site. Unfortunatly the “free” stable version (2.3) is a little behind, it still uses Solr 1.4. I recommend downloading the extension from github. Being open source the codebase gets updated often, even better it uses a more up to date version of Solr (3.1).
In conclusion, eZ Find is highly powerful and scalable. If you use eZ Publish I strongly suggest you look into eZ Find as an alternative search engine. Look forward to my next post about how to install eZ Find into your website.