DevsBuild.It, the services site for the Application Developers Alliance trade association, is a great example of Solr and Search API integration.

The Application Developers Alliance is a trade association that maintains a growing network of content to support and advocate for developers.

Palantir.net joined forces with the Alliance to extend their existing network and create an interlinked and discoverable content experience. Solr provides the backbone not only for fast and effective search, but also provides a significant speed advantage for browsing and relating content in non-search contexts.

We also split the existing Drupal instance into two instances: the Network and the Main site. This split allows the Alliance to push out new functionality for members while retaining a smaller stable site which provides a portfolio of the association and its ongoing work.

With the many changes that were implemented, the move away from a custom search back-end to Solr provided the Alliance with big step forward with the technology.

We will discuss:

• the technical details
• Server configuration - System Administration
• Drupal architecture and implementation using Solr and Search API
• Examples of Views that use Solr as a base
• How we did the split from one instance to two
• the benefits
• accuracy
• performance