Solr 3.6 Update

by Tyler on May 14, 2012 in Development, eZ Find, eZ Publish with No comments

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!

Searching Multiple Solr Cores using Shards and eZ Find

by Tyler on May 8, 2012 in eZ Find, eZ Publish with 1 Comment
A distributed search with eZ Find

Prerequisites:
eZ Publish with eZ Find installed

The following post is based on the option in the eZ Find solr.ini referring to Shards.

[SolrBase]
#SearchServerURI=http://localhost:8983/solr
#Shards mapping, can be to multicores in one servlet or even a crosss servers
#typical use is multilingual setups, but also for external index support
#the keys are used as shorthands in template functions
#Shards[]
#Shards[eng-GB]=http://localhost:8983/solr/eng-GB
#Shards[fre-FR]=http://localhost:8983/solr/fre-FR
#Shards[myforeignindex]=http://myotherhost:8983/solr

What this means for eZ Find developers: we can do a distributed search in our standard eZ Find fetch (with a little work).
Continue reading →

eZ Find: Enable Attribute Storage

by Tyler on April 26, 2012 in eZ Find, eZ Publish with 1 Comment
enabling solr attribute storage with eZ Find

When using eZ Find to search a single local site, it does a really good job at building out the result object to be used. What becomes a problem, however, is when a cross-site search is necessary. When the search fetch includes 'as_objects', true() eZ Find tries to build out an object by fetching from the database after the Solr search is completed and the necessary content is returned.

Another option, however, is to return all the information from Solr, no more object building from the DB. To do this all you have to do is enable EnableSolrAttributeStorage in the ezfind.ini. That way, if you are searching on a site that does not have access to the local database (cross-site search for instance) you can return all the content you need from Solr, because it is all stored.

 

So remember, set:
'as_objects', false() in the fetch.

and in the ezfind.ini

[IndexOptions]
EnableSolrAttributeStorage=true

Then just remember to re-index your content to get all the new attributes in there.

 

Dogs Underwater

by Tyler on April 23, 2012 in Dogs with No comments

I am usually not one for email forwards. I got one today that I absolutely love, however. So, instead of re-forwarding it, I will share it here.

I found the original author of the pictures here (the email had no information about the author).

eZ Find Multi-Core

by Tyler on April 20, 2012 in eZ Find with No comments

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 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 it’s multi-core functionality, to get information across the sites with ease. That way, all the sites can keep and maintain their own databases.

Solr DirectorySo, to start. Let’s assume that if you are reading this, you already read through my previous eZ Find tutorial (Installing eZ Find). Since we already have our sever up and running there won’t be a lot of work to do there. But, we need to move our conf files to the solr multicore directory. Last time we used the solr directory, this time we need to use the directory ‘solr.multicore.’ Inside the multicore directory there are a couple of demo cores for languages. What I did is duplicated the english directory a couple times and renamed them for each site.

Continue reading →

Clear Cache in eZ Publish – eZpedia

by Tyler on April 12, 2012 in eZ Publish with 3 Comments

As an eZ Publish developer I know that whenever creating an eZ Publish site the cache can be my best friend in production and worst enemy in development. eZpedia has a great article all about clearing the cache.

Clear Cache in eZ Publish / Solution / Root – eZpedia.

My favorite is the manually clearing of the cache. For some reason the clear-cache script sometimes misses some files; so the only way you are going to see your changes is by dumping those files manually.

cd /path/to/ezpublish;
rm -vrf var/cache;
rm -vrf var/ezwebin_site/cache

rm -vrf is very scary to run (remove all?!?), but so long as you are doing this to the specified directory you should be safe (but be careful).

Despite Bings Rise, Google Still Dominates Search [INFOGRAPHIC]

by Tyler on March 26, 2012 in Technology with No comments

Very interesting, Bing is on the rise but it appears to be at the expense of Yahoo! not Google.

Despite Bings Rise, Google Still Dominates Search [INFOGRAPHIC].

Installing eZ Find

by Tyler on March 22, 2012 in eZ Find with 1 Comment

 

eZ Find extension in finderAlright, 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?Solr installed locally

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 intall 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 1 Solr install. Also note that I just installed Solr locally, but it can also be installed on remote servers. Continue reading →

eZ Find Basics

by Tyler on March 19, 2012 in eZ Find with No comments

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 from 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 Pubish 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.

Tyler’s Weekly Update for 2012-03-16

by Tyler on March 16, 2012 in Uncategorized with No comments

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