Presenting: The Sitecore Search Series

Over the past 6 months I've been working quite intensely with both Solr and Sitecore's ContentSearch API - and then I thought, why not share what I learned along the way?

Where does the Sitecore Search Series fit into the picture?

During the time I've been working with Solr and Sitecore, I've been setting up various Solr instances, and learned how to work effectively with the administration toolset in terms of understanding and debugging Solr queries.

I've also been using, extending, as well as seen a great amount of code behind the internals of the Sitecore's ContentSearch API. I spend a great amount of time learning, how things are working behind the scenes, which enabled me to bend the functionality to my favour for the implementations I was working on. And in case I forgot to mention, I might have spend even more time going over Sitecore's documentation and several blog posts by other Sitecore community members ♥

While working and learning, I've took a lot of notes and made small guides, in order to remember the important bits and pieces and this is where this series comes into the picture. On the basis of my notes and guides, the purpose of the series is to share some of my hard-won knowledge, including best-practices, the ups and downs, tips and tricks and so on.

Hopefully this series might save you some time, and avoid making some of the mistakes I first did when I started working with Sitecore and Solr together.

What's planned so far

To give you a sneak peek on what this series will contain, I've outlined some of the planned content, that will be part of the Sitecore Search series (disclaimer: planned content is subject to change):

Basic

• Setting up Solr for Sitecore 8.x
• A (re)introduction to the ContentSearch API in Sitecore, Part 1 and Part 2
• Extending the default ContentSearch functionality in Sitecore
• Tackling the challenges of architecting an search indexing infrastructure in Sitecore, Part 1 and Part 2
• Diagnosing search queries and indexes in Sitecore using Solr

Advanced

• Working with complex field types when using the ContentSearch API in Sitecore
• Implementing a generic search framework on top of the ContentSearch API, using it as a base layer for all searches

A few last minute notes

As already mentioned above, the planned content is only preliminary, and may change as the series evolve. However, most of the planned content mentioned have already been sketched out (and some is already in the making), so you can expect that most of it will arrive. Speaking of which, the first blog post in the series is just in its final writing stage, and should arrive very soon.

As always, if you have any comments or questions, please let me know in the comments section down below.