On a recent project, it was required to do a quick integration between Tridion and a search engine (in this case Solr). We needed to push content directly in the index, rather than using a crawling approach, and there were a couple of simple search interfaces, including the ubiquitous one-box search to integrate in the web application.

Sound familiar? It may well do… almost every Tridion project requires integration with some kind of search engine, and I have to confess I am guilty of re-inventing the wheel most of the time, hacking some code from the previous project around to create something that suits the requirement of the next project

This time I thought, lets do it differently – wouldn’t it be great if there was a generic framework for search integration, that could be used on any Tridion Search Engine integration project, which you could configure/extend (controlled hacking!) as required for the particular project requirements?

Raimond Kempees and I have created that framework as an open source project and presented it at this weeks Tridion Community Webinar.

I will follow with some more posts on this project, but as a teaser, our goal is to take your existing (Tridion 2011+) implementation and have you indexing content, and a simple one-box-search running on your site in less than 2 hours, using the out-of-the-box features of the framework, and the open source search engine Solr.