A full week of Search API sprinting.

With the goal to port Search API to Drupal 8 we organized a sprint from 28. April to 2. Mai 2014. The goals were ambitiously set. Due to a large number of competent participants it was a big succes and most targets have been reached!

A week of community work and super heroes

A total of 15 community members participated, 10 of which were present at our offices in Zürich. In addition to Andrei Mateescu we were able to secure the help of two important members of the Search API and Solr community. Thomas Seidl from Austria (drunken_monkey, Maintainer of the Search API module) and Nick Veenhof from Belgium (Nick_Vh, Maintainer of the apachesolr module) made their way to Switzerland.

As should be, social activities were included as well. In spite of the cool and unfriendly weather there was a grill night with lots of food and beer. And a lot of Drupal chitchat.

First successes by Tuesday!

Our main target for the week was getting the search working, integrating views and the database backend. So we worked on those two topic in parallel and by Tuesday night we achieved the break through. For the first time we could present search results in a view in D8!

Another group worked on additional components. They reworked the processors and added test coverage. Multilingual content support was successfully added as a new feature for the Drupal 8 version of Search API. The User Interface for Search API was improved and discussions started on further improvements for future sprints.

Presentation of the results during the Drupal User Group meeting

During the regular Drupal User Group (DUG) meeting on Wednesday we could already show a working view. Local elements as well as imported blog posts from the Drupal Planet were searched and listed in views.

Beginners welcome!

Some participants were pretty new to Drupal 8 and were not in a position to add a lot to the quite demanding tasks. They used their time to learn about Drupal 8 by implementing examples and porting other modules. The presence and support of the experts helped a lot. That seems to be a good model for progressing fast.