The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial showing you how to use the Solarium library to search SOLR. Solarium is a PHP-based, open source tool that helps make interfacing with a SOLR search instance much easier. This post is part one of a larger series covering the combination of SOLR and Solarium.

Apache’s SOLR is an enterprise-level search platform based on Apache Lucene. It provides a powerful full-text search along with advanced features such as faceted search, result highlighting and geospatial search. [...] If you’re using PHP then the Solarium Project makes integration even easier, providing a level of abstraction over the underlying requests which enables you to use SOLR as if it were a native implementation running within your application. In this series, I’m going to introduce both SOLR and Solarium side-by-side.

He starts with some of the basic concepts behind what SOLR is, what kinds of things it's useful for and how to get it installed on your system (using Homebrew). He shows how to set up a sample schema including a detailed look at the different types and required fields it will need. As this is just the first part of the series, it stops there and will get into the actual PHP code for the interface in the next edition.