Today I released Beta 2 of the ApacheSolr module, the module responsible for search on Robshouse.net. There are some bugfixes, some performance improvements, and a usability improvement, but most of all there is a new feature. With this release it is possible to sort search results. If you search on this site you will notice a block inviting you to Sort by, and your options are Title, Author, Type and Date. Author doesn’t make much sense on this site since there is only one, but I think the other sorts will be useful to people who want to find things like the first post I wrote here about Drupal.

I’d also like to encourage people who are using the ApacheSolr module to send me links to their search pages and I’ll start compiling a showcase.

Here is the video of my ApacheSolr presentation at FOSDEM. I had some technical difficulties (thank you very much, Keynote) at the beginning, but you can fast-forward past that bit.

I’ve relaunched RobsHouse.net on Drupal 5, yay! It was about time, too. For years it was running on a 4.6 Drupal (Civicspace, actually), and I had done nothing but break it more and more over the years. Thank goodness nobody could see the watchdog messages… PHP errors galore and just about everything else wrong as well. This site, however, is a different beast. While it is not comparable in complexity to some of the large media sites that are being launched on Drupal these days, it’s a pretty good effort for one guy over a long weekend. I’m using 54 custom modules on this site! Click here to see the full list. More details after the break.