There will be up to two Search API in Drupal 8 sessions with me (one for developers with Nick Veenhof and one for site builders) at DrupalCon Amsterdam this autumn. (Update: Sadly, both of these sessions have been rejected, there will only be a Search API BoF.)
There will also be a sprint dedicated to porting the Search API to Drupal 8, more or less throughout the whole week.
Visitors Voice Free is a great new solution that lets you easily customize your site's search results by re-ordering or changing them at will. It integrates with Search API Solr Search to automatically apply your changes in all searches on the site.
Site Search Analysis is a rather recent addition to a site administrator's toolbox, but it has gained a lot of traction in the past few years – and very justly so, in my opinion. Analyzing what people search for once they are on your site, and how they react to the search results you (resp. your site) present them, can tell you a lot about what your visitors want and thus be an immense help in improving your site's content (and search).
While it started energetically enough, the D8 port of the Search API didn't really get anywhere when I tried it this summer, due to a lack of time and, partly, plan. So, this time I'll try to plan ahead, take the time necessary and get everyone on board to help. So the Drupal 8 upgrade of the Search API (second try) will officially kick off at the Drupal Dev Days in Szeged.
If you want to help in any way, be there!
For a few months now, I have been using, and was completely amazed by PhpStorm, a PHP IDE that is (as far as I can tell) vastly gaining popularity. There was now a version 7.0 released which even includes some native support for Drupal!
In this post I share a few tips for other things you can do to make developing with PhpStorm fro Drupal smoother.
Most people who regularly use the Drupal.org issue queues will probably (or hopefully) be familiar with Dreditor, Daniel Kudwien's incredibly useful user script which streamlines the UI, helps you to easily review patches and also contains autocompletion for HTML typed in textareas on the site.
Since that last feature would also be very useful for any other site where you can enter (possibly filtered) HTML, I went and "ported" the autocomplete part of his script to also work with other Drupal sites. See the full post to get it.
In Part 1 of this series, I explained how to create a basic configuration entity in Drupal 8. But the task wasn't completely finished: you should also always specify the schema for your configuration entities (as well as for other configuration). So in this (slightly shorter) tutorial part, I will cover the general new Configuration API as well as configuration schemas.
The 8.x version of Drupal has entered Alpha stage and people everywhere are telling you to port your modules now. However, proper documentation is scarce and existing tutorials or examples only explain the simplest steps. Bad for modules like the Search API, which use things like entity types and plugins, and aren't as easy to port.
Still, I decided to venture into the unknown and start porting now. It was about as bad as I'd feared and I'm still far, far from finished, but I nevertheless wanted to share the first advanced pieces of updating wisdom I've found. Hopefully it will help others get started more smoothly than I did.
One of the most sought-after features for the Search API has now finally been completely integrated. After Mattias Michaux implemented proximity searches almost two years ago, I was recently sponsored to polish his code and finally integrate it properly with all related modules, especially Solr search. So now, location support for the Search API is finally the just-enable feature it should be, with the Search API Location module and its new Beta 1 release.
After being production-ready for a long while and having accumulated several thousand users, the Search API Solr Search project has now finally got a stable release. Included is the promise and hope that the configuration files and inner workings of the module are now insofar stable, as that future minor version upgrades won't require any re-indexing anymore.
If you are using an older version (especially pre-RC4), upgrade now and benefit from a range of new features and bug fixes!
