On a current project, I discovered the truth to the phrase in the Drupal community of "there's a module for that". As I initially looked at what I needed to do for a requirement, I was thinking that I would need to write a small amount of custom code in a glue module, but upon doing more research, I discovered that there were multiple modules that, when pieced together, would do exactly what I needed. And of course, as always, I knew I had to blog about it. Please raise your hand if you have any questions.

I suggested in another blog post (which I'm still writing and will link here when I'm done) that Solr could be used to drive site-wide navigation. Robert Douglas was recently quoted to me (second hand, so I can't verify the source) that the main reason to use Solr is for facets. I would add relevancy scores to that list, but that's for another post. What occurred to me one day was that facets look a lot like “traditional” navigation, only they are smarter (and better looking) than menu items or Views exposed filters.

Recently, I created my first Context plugin. The proceedure was extremely straightforward, with the exception of one step, which was not obvious to me and had me a little stumped. To the end of helping others over that and possibly other humps, I'd like to present the bare bones of a context plugin.

Recently, a client approached us to create functionality for their Drupal site similar to what Zappos.com does, but based on user activity of the site. The idea is that we would present the user a map, and plot the latest user activity update as a point on the map using geocoded data based on IP address. Then, after a certain interval of time, we make an ajax call to the server to see if there has been any new activity updates in this interval. Kind of like a Facebook wall meets maps. Sounds easy enough, right?

The other day while hanging out in IRC, I was pinged by katbailey, the Lady of the Lovely Voice (I could listen to her talk for hours) with a question about sorting in Solr when a sort field doesn't contain a value.  In particular, how can you control whether nodes without a value in the sort field show up at the beginning or end of the search results?  In her particular case, there was a Price field that was being sorted on, but not all nodes had a Price value, and the ones without Price were showing up at the beginning of the list.

Ajax form validation is one of those features typically tasked to a Drupal Developer. Here is how it is accomplished in Drupal 6.

As some of you who follow Drupal Planet might have noticed, I have "taken over" the Acquia Drupal podcast.  I've always followed Drupal podcasts, including the Acquia podcast. I had noticed that there had not been any new episodes put out in a while, and so I approached Robert Douglass and Bryan House of Acquia at Drupalcon San Francisco back in April about continuing the podcast .  They agreed, and so I took it from there.

One of the things I've had to do recently is set up a development server that has multiple sites with Apache Solr so that each site has its own index in Solr.  After searching the internets for information on how to do this, I found two sources that contained part of the process, but not put together in a way that worked for me.  
 

As I mentioned in my previous post on adding a custom sort to Solr, this post is about something that is even simpler; adding a new field to the search results.  In our particular use case, we wanted to add a CCK image field to the results.  To add a slight twist, we needed to add a different image depending on the content type: the user picture for a profile node (created with content_profile module) or a CCK imagefield named field_main_image from the other content types.