SI4T 2.0 : Call to Arms

resized imagesIts just over a year since Raimond and I launched SI4T – an open source search integration framework for Tridion published content. In that time the uptake has been good – I heard many stories of it being put into action after my TDS talk in May, and a trickle of questions has started appearing on stack exchange. As such, we feel its time to plan a new release, so this post is a call to arms to give anyone who has benefited from the framework the opportunity to give something back and create an even better solution.

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Inside SI4T search integrations : Controlling what gets indexed

si4t-logoThe open source SI4T (Search Integration for Tridion) project allows you to pass through 3 levels of control over what content gets indexed: Firstly, the default, zero-configuration behaviour. Then there is fine-grained configuration via metadata and parameters, and finally total extensibility by coding your own indexing TBBs. This article talks through how you can refine your indexing strategy by passing through these levels. Continue reading

Tridion Search Engine Integration – Stop re-inventing the wheel

On a recent project, it was required to do a quick integration between Tridion and a search engine (in this case Solr). We needed to push content directly in the index, rather than using a crawling approach, and there were a couple of simple search interfaces, including the ubiquitous one-box search to integrate in the web application.

Sound familiar? It may well do… almost every Tridion project requires integration with some kind of search engine, and I have to confess I am guilty of re-inventing the wheel most of the time, hacking some code from the previous project around to create something that suits the requirement of the next project

This time I thought, lets do it differently – wouldn’t it be great if there was a generic framework for search integration, that could be used on any Tridion Search Engine integration project, which you could configure/extend (controlled hacking!) as required for the particular project requirements?

Raimond Kempees and I have created that framework as an open source project and presented it at this weeks Tridion Community Webinar.

I will follow with some more posts on this project, but as a teaser, our goal is to take your existing (Tridion 2011+) implementation and have you indexing content, and a simple one-box-search running on your site in less than 2 hours, using the out-of-the-box features of the framework, and the open source search engine Solr.