Easiest SOLR install for a non coder? Is it a CMS? Low budget

Question

I need a simple way to have powerful search. Im pretty confident in Solr being the right solution as per here Can solr serve individual documents like a CMS would?

however I am trying to find the best off the shelf solution that can work with this non programmer, that is as lightweight as possible.

At this stage I have installed Solr 3.5 and its working.

I tried D7 but could not comfortably load the required data into the nodes, its very very slow.

I have tried Joomla which I am comfortable with however no real working SOLR solution is available, cannot connect with them and the documentation is very poor. That and of course no support for extra fields meaning no facets.

We only need a very ugly, very lightweight solution and prefer something out of the box.

I have looked at some of the PHP clients however most, as far as I can tell, are not really a full solution, I still have to code search/results pages etc. That part is beyond my capabilities.

I can hack code but not write it.

Ez publish + Ez find looks good but I have no experience with it and cannot find any info regarding pricing.

So my questions are, should I just persevere and try the php route? Does anyone have any off the shelf solutions?

Is there better support for Drupal6 in terms of loading data into nodes (approx 150k records with 50 CCK fields to start however moving quickly to 500k records) - this burnt out drupal7 using the feeds module.

Any ideas are appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

I can ony give you a few hints regarding eZ Publish.

Note regarding free/enterprise editions

Regarding eZ Publish & eZ Find, there's nothing to pay for unless you want to get official support, maintenaincy and professional services from eZ Systems. Please see this post if you want clarification (or ask for more) : Ez Publish 4.5 is free or is only Enterprise Edition?

What eZ Find is

eZ Find is an advanced connector between your content repository and your search engine (Solr). With eZ Find enabled, as soon as you publish a content, it's indexed in Solr and available in the search module/view (you can also enable delay indexing if you have a lot of contents being published and you don't need your indexes updated that much).

Features that are supported and implemented by eZ Publish when using eZFind & Solr :

• fuzzy match
• facets search
• spell-check suggestion (based in the Solr index and synonym files)
• multi-language
• advanced roles & policies management
• highlighting
• relevancy calculation (which can be tuned)
• ...

Installation

A built-in Solr server is provided when you install eZ Find, with start/stop script for the common Linux distributions so you won't need to install it through yum, apt-get or something else. You can also install it on your server (or a dedicated one) if you want since your search engine backend is configurable in eZ Find settings.

Development

Depending on what you want to do, yes you'll need to learn a bit of eZ Publish but with eZ Find, implementing search features everywhere in your website will be quite easy. Do not hesitate to ask for help at : http://share.ez.no You might be lost some times, but when as soon as you'll understand eZ Publish concept & basics, it's not that difficult.

Last but not least you need to know that eZ Find search requests are extendable using the Solr syntax so you should not be stuck anywhere.

Amount of contents to be published/indexed

Should not be a problem since a lot of installation deal with millions of contents in their database.

Answer 2

eZ Find is very powerful and obviously works great in eZ Publish. Installing it is actually very very easy. However, because it eZ Publish there will be some templating involved. Check out this post for a nice "How To" install eZ Find into eZ Publish. The likely reason that you are having trouble with Drupal being slow is that it requires some pretty heavy server-side caching, something that eZ Publish comes with out of the box. I don't know of any better CMS Solr powered search than eZ Find. Also, be sure to check out the doc.