Creating search functionality can be the most daunting part of putting together an application. Even if you can get past the notion of indexing every single piece of content you want to make available, there’s still the issue of performing the actual search and providing results based on relevancy. It’s a complex task, and one many developers are loath to tackle. A search server application such as Apache Solr makes searching easier, but indexing unstructured content can still be a bit of a challenge.

LucidWorks Enterprise, built on Apache Solr/Lucene, goes the extra mile to make that part easy too. This step-by-step guide shows a programmatic approach to working with LucidWorks Enterprise, the search solution from LucidWorks Enterprise built on Apache Solr. We’ll show how to add content, index it, create a web page (with example PHP code) to send search requests and display results, add search fields using the REST API, and then add search features such as faceted search. Code samples and screen shots are included.