The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the third part of their series looking at using the Solarium tool to hook your PHP application into a SOLR search instance. In this latest part of the series they get down to the actual search implementation.

In the first part I introduced the key concepts and we installed and set up SOLR. In part two we installed and configured Solarium, a library which enables us to use PHP to “talk” to SOLR as if it were a native component. Now we’re finally ready to start building the search mechanism, which is the subject of this installment.

He starts with a simple search example, making a request to select the matches for a given query (given on the URL as a variable "q"). He shows how to run the select and fetch the results as a result set. He enhances this, containing the search logic inside a class and making a template to show the results. He also includes examples of how to use the "Disjunction Max", sorting and pagination functionality. Finally, he looks at a more complex type of search, a faceted search, and includes code examples of making the request and displaying the results.