Sites vs. Indexes

This is the second part in our series Road to Apache Solr for TYPO3 Version 2.0 and 2.5-EAP. Today we'd like to talk about changes we made in regard to handling and maintaining of indexes.

Since the introduction of the Index Queue in the EAP version we always had to manage and update two versions of the TYPO3 page indexer - frontend and Index Queue. Obviously this was not optimal and inevitably led to different sets of supported features in both indexers. So the first thing we worked on in v2.5-dev (back then v1.7-dev) was to re-unite these two indexers to have them at the same level and to also reduce maintenance efforts on our side.

The cool thing about the early access program is that we get a lot of feedback from the participants of the program about what works and what doesn't and also what is really needed for search in real life projects.

This led to a couple of smaller enhancements like the move from an index-based approach in managing the Solr TYPO3 integration to a site-based approach. For example, previously when configuring the Index Queue Worker Task in TYPO3's scheduler you had to select which index the worker should index to. However, with multi-language, single-tree sites in TYPO3 you have multiple indexes for one site: one for each language. All these indexes would be selectable although only one Worker Task was needed per site. Thus many people were confused and set up multiple Index Queue Worker Tasks for one site. This made it harder to set up the Worker Task than it needs to be.

As a result of this there's a backwards compatibility break and you need to remove the Index Queue Worker Tasks using the scheduler backend module prior to updating or using tools like phpmyadmin after updating. You then simply create the tasks like before, but being offered only sites instead of indexes. We could have gone for ultimate backwards compatibility but in this case we didn't as it saved a lot of work on our side and also shouldn't involve a lot of work on a site admin's side either. This change is also one of the reasons why we chose to increase the major version number.