In this post to his site Peter Steenbergen shows you how to integrate SOLR searching into your Laravel application via the PHP Solarium library.

This is my second blog in a series about SOLR with the PHP Solarium library. My first blog was about the usage of OR filters to create Multi-Select facets with SOLR. With this blog item I will show you how easy it is to implement the PHP Solarium library in the Laravel framework.

He starts off with a fresh Laravel install and configures it to connect to a local SOLR server (he assumes you already have one running at this point). The he installs the Solarium library through Composer and makes a new service provider to create the client and bind it to the dependency injection container (app). To test the connection he makes a basic controller with one endpoint and an injected version of the Solarium client. With this working, he introduces the code from his previous post allowing for multi-select facet searching to return matching results.

In the latest post to the SitePoint PHP blog Lukas Smith takes a look at content management systems comparing trees versus facets versus tags in content organization.

For several years I have been interested in content repositories as a key aspect of modern CMS. With “modern”, I mean CMS that are not just “page management systems” but CMS that actually manage content, thereby enabling authors to reuse their content on different devices and even different applications. But when evaluating [prismic.io and contentful.com], I noticed a surprising trend: they do not leverage trees, neither as a native storage concept nor as a visualization concept. Instead, they for the most part rely on flat structures with tagging. My gut feeling was telling me that this was a mistake, especially when managing larger content repositories. At the same time I wondered: “Am I just a dinosaur that is missing the ark?”.

He starts with an introduction to the concepts of trees, facets and tags and starts in on the advantages and disadvantages of each. For each topic he shares a brief summary of what they are and a screenshot showing how they could be visualized. He finishes the post with a "tl;dr;" summarizing the points made for those wanting the basics.

If you're a user of the Solarium tool for querying Solr database already and have been wondering how to work with faceting, you should take a look at this new post from Jeroen van Dijk. He covers using Solarium to do multi-select faceting in a Solr query.

Solarium is a library I often use at Enrise for querying Solr. For one of the projects I work on, AutoTrack.nl a second hand car site, I was having issues on advanced faceting with Solr which I could easily solve using Solarium. [...] Faceting is a technique for guided navigation where search results are separated into categories, often including counts on those categories. The user can then select from those categories to restrict their search step by step.

He includes an example of what kind of results this sort of searching could return and how you can use the "facet.mincount" to restrict the results to an even finer set. There's a bit of code included showing how to use this filtering method with a combination of "addFilterQuery" and "createFacetField" calls before executing the select through Solarium.