solr Plugin

Installation has three stages - basic installation, Solr configuration and integration with your DokuWiki template.

For basic installation install the plugin using the Plugin Manager and the download URL above, which points to latest version of the plugin. Refer to Plugins on how to install plugins manually.

For Solr configuration install and configure a Solr server with the instructions from the Solr Wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/solr/FrontPage ). For testing purposes you can use the example environment in the `example` folder of the Solr distribution. On the command line, change to the example folder and type

  java -jar start.jar

The `schema.xml` file that comes with this plugin can be used as your starting point for creating a Solr search schema. Consider adding stop words to the stop word list. Also consider using language-specific stemmers and domain-specific synonyms.

If your Solr server is not located at the URL http://localhost:8983/solr you have to open the DokuWiki configuration page and set the Solr URL in the input field for the Solr plugin.

The last step of the installation is the integration with your DokuWiki template, i.e. replacing the standard wiki search field with the Solr search field. Open the `main.php` file of you template and look for the code

   <?php tpl_searchform(); ?>

Replace it with the following code:

  <?php 
    $solr =& plugin_load("helper", "solr");
    $solr->tpl_searchform(true, false); // Search field with ajax and no autocomplete
  ?> 
  

This will create a search form where the search terms are searched in the content of the document. Search terms that occur in the first headline (the page title) or the first paragraph (the page abstract) will give the result document a higher ranking. Wildcards are automatically added at the end of each search term.

The plugin provides a form for advanced search where users can search for exact phrases, exclude words, search inside page titles, abstracts and namespaces and search for specific authors. To create a button to the advanced search form, place the following code at the appropriate place in your `main.php`:

  <?php
    $solr =& plugin_load("helper", "solr");
    $solr->htmlAdvancedSearchBtn();
   ?>

You can call the command line script `index_all.php` that comes with this plugin to index all of your wiki pages. The speed of this script greatly depends on your server speed, so you should not have an execution time limiit for PHP scripts started on the command line.

Each page is also indexed when it is visited by a user. See the next section on how the indexing mechanism works.

After installing the plugin it will index every page using the DokuWiki indexing mechanism: An invisible graphic that calls the file `lib/exe/indexer.php`. `indexer.php` issues an event which is handled by the Solr plugin if the page was modified since it was last indexed. After the plugin has indexed a page, it creates a file with the suffix `.solr_indexed` in the page's meta directory. If the modification date of this file is greater than the page modification date, the plugin does nothing and the other indexing actions specified in `indexer.php` are taken.

• Searching by date: At the moment the creation and modification date is indexed but there is no way to search for it. This is because DokuWiki has no API for creating localized date entry fields and I don't want to create such a field myself.
• Raw Search: A separate search field that Doesn't add wild cards and where you can use every Lucene search operator available (fuzzy proximity search, OR operator, etc).
• Searching PDF, DOC etc would be great.
  • According to the SOLR website, this already is one of the features of SOLR: “Rich Document Parsing and Indexing (PDF, Word, HTML, etc) using Apache Tika”. Is it just a question of telling the indexer where the mediafiles are located? Maybe a look at docsearch plugin could be of help. Docsearch works but does not return previews of the search results (just the link to the file) and no backlinks to the page where the file is used.
  • It would be fantastic if Dokuwiki could index mediafiles for the search functions as this would very much enhance its value as a tool for knowledge management.

Q: Does this plugin use the PECL solr extension?
A: No, this plugin has no dependency on the PECL extension. Instead, it communicates via HTTP requests with the Solr server.