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Drupal 8: Creating Custom Fields In Search API

25th December 2020 - 12 minutes read time

Pushing data from Drupal into Solr is a really convenient way of creating a robust and extensible search solution. The Search API module has a number of different fields available that can be used to integrate with all sorts of fields, but what isn't included is computed fields or other data.

Thankfully, adding a custom field into the Search API system doesn't need a lot of code. A single class, with an optional hook, is all that's needed to het everything working.

I was recently looking at the node view count module that was being used to record what users viewed what nodes on a Drupal site. What was needed was a report page that had a bunch of data from different fields of a node, along with the node view count data. As this data wasn't immediately available to Solr I needed to find a way to inject the data into Solr using the mechanisms that Search API has.

Drupal 8: Creating A Views Results Area Plugin

23rd March 2020 - 4 minutes read time

Drupal Views is a great way of exposing data to users via a search interface. This can be done directly via the database or via a Solr server. Plenty of Views plugins exist to allow reacting to the search input and output in a variety of different ways.

The other day I needed to add a personalised message to Views output to inform a user that their search keyword didn't find any results. There is a plugin for Views that allows this, but it only shows a basic search string.

What I needed was a way to print out the following block of HTML, containing the search term that the user searched for.

How To Change No Search Results Text In Drupal 6

2nd February 2012 - 3 minutes read time

Every Drupal project I finish will usually have the same request at some point. This usually happens when the client tries to do a search that produces no results and sees the search hinting text about blue smurfs.

The text about blue smurfs that is printed when there are no search results is called directly in the search module so it isn't possible to edit or override it. The solution is to use the theme_box() theme hook and override the text just before it is sent to the page. Just drop the following code into your theme.php file, rename the function to fit your theme and clear your caches.

Related Items Block Using Drupal 6 Search

23rd May 2010 - 12 minutes read time

A related items block looks at the current content of the page and tries to present the user with a list of items that relate to the current content. Creating a related items block is quite easy, and is a good way of introducing the search module api without having to get to involved in the search module.

Before starting I should point out that there are other related items modules available. These are modules like Related Nodes or Related Items but these modules either aren't released for Drupal 6, or simply don't work in the way I wanted the block to work. I wanted a module that would act with little or no user input.