Drupalcon Day 1
Unless you’re a big web technology nerd, you can just ignore this post, it’s mostly for my benefit later next week to remember what I learned this week.
Today’s sessions were somewhat productive. I picked up a few tidbits of knowledge. The highlight was probably Apache Solr. Somehow this technology missed my radar completely. It was my first time learning about it and there’s a module for it in Drupal. It’s based on Lucene. Basically Apache Solr is a wrapper around Lucene. It’s the coolest search ever!
It has result biasing; so for instance “sticky” articles can have higher weights (or lower), articles with more comments can have higher weights (or lower), etc. It also has advanced features that let you exclude content types or apply weightages for content types, even CCK fields weights! It lets the user sort by relevance, title, date, etc. in a block. It also lets users filter by content type in a block. It has a “More Like This” block that finds articles with similar keywords and suggests them to users. Like Google, it also has “Did you mean ***** ?” functionality. I guess sites like Netflix, Cnet, Citysearch, Stubhub, Gamespot and AOL use Apache Solr. It takes a dedicated server though and some configuration… I’ll have to investigate this further. Right now I’m sold on all the bells and whistles and the magic they performed at the session.
It was my first time seeing Dries Buytaert (creator of Drupal) speak. He’s an excellent speaker and kept the crowd engaged with his awesome slides during the keynote. He gave a great history of Drupal and how the community keeps doubling year after year.
I sat in for an Organic Groups session and it was sadly not as great as I hoped. It mostly confirmed everything I already learned on my own last week. Although, it did give me a [possibly] better idea for subgroups I need to look into (taxonomy).
On a side note, the convention center is not a safe neighborhood at all. My hotel is a nice historic hotel about 2 blocks away, but still it’s a bad neighborhood to walk through. Here’s some pics I took while rushing through to safety armed with my pepper spray! (haha… dramatic enough?):
Apache Solr Rocks, Its one of those things which came into existence to bring that grand wise man sitting in corner to the center of the herd. The wise man being “lucene”, Ahh I so miss lucene.