[TYPO3-Solr] [Announce] EXT:solr v2.8.0 released

[Ingo Renner]

Hi all,

Apache Solr for TYPO3 v2.8 released

We're happy to announce the release of Apache Solr for TYPO3 (EXT:solr) 
version 2.8.0. With this release we now support and integrate with all 
major features of TYPO3 CMS, including workspaces, start and stop time 
support, access restrictions, multi-language and multi-site handling, 
and more.


Changes in the Early Access Program

This release marks a new milestone in the development of Apache Solr for 
TYPO3. Until now there have been two versions of the extension, one 
publicly available in the TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER), and a 
"private" one available from dkd with additional features over the 
public one.

Starting with version 2.8.0, there will be only one version of the 
extension, publicly available from TER. Many additional features 
previously exclusive to the EAP version have been moved to the public 
version now. Other features are now available as add-on extensions from dkd.

This allows to reduce the amount of work involved with maintenance of 
the extension. On the other hand it also allows to choose add-on 
functionality as needed and to distribute them to customers as they 
require them.


New in this Release

Apache Solr 3.6

With this release we're moving to Apache Solr 3.6. This brings bug fixes 
on the Solr server side of course, but also allows us to now provide 
support for start and stop time in TYPO3 since we are using 
functionality introduced with Solr 3.6.

The index schema and Solr configuration files have been adopted and 
optimized for Solr 3.6. This includes enabling the Solr index browser 
(browse request handler), JSON update request handler, and analysis 
request handler.


General Changes

* We added support for workspaces so that changes will get indexed when 
they are published to LIVE, but not before that. Until now we of course 
did not index unpublished changes either, however the extension did not 
recognize the workspace publish and swap events.

* Support for start and stop time based publishing has been added. Pages 
and records will be indexed once their start time has been reached. When 
the stop time passes, content will be removed from the index again.

* Selected features previously exclusive to the EAP version of the 
extension are now available free of charge and ship with the extension 
released in TER. New features include hierarchical facets, frequent 
searches, last searches, and a result document score analyzer.


Other Changes and Notable Bug Fixes

* New hooks and interfaces to customize functionality
* General bug fixes and stability improvements
* Improvements to the backend module for index maintenance
* PHP 5.4 compatibility
* Support for indexing of records that exist only in specific languages, 
but not in the default language


Updating

This release requires Apache Solr 3.6 to work! Start and stop time 
support depends on functionality only available from Apache Solr 3.6 and 
up. Also the Solr configuration and schema files have been updated for 
Solr 3.6. The easiest way to install Solr is to use the install script 
that ships with the extension. This script will install the latest 
version, Apache Solr 3.6.1.

Although we try to change the schema only when necessary and thus making 
updating the extension painless we had to adopt schema and configuration 
files with this release. After updating Solr you will need to re-index 
your content due to the schema changes. Apologizes for any inconvenience 
caused by this.

Updating the TYPO3 extension should be straight forward.

Other changes can be found in the update guide: 
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension-solr/wiki/V220_to_v280



Contributors

(patches, comments, bug reports, ... no particular order)

Steffen Gebert
Stephan Schuler
Jonas Götze
Heiko Kromm
Stefan Sprenger
Michel Tremblay
Peter Kraume
Constantin Lebrecht
Laurent Cherpit
Andreas Beutel
Rolf Hofmann
Florian Megyesi
Pierrick Caillon
Dominik Steinborn
Dimitry Dulepov
Albert van der Veen
Witali Rott
Alexander Wende
Stefan Galinski
Jigal van Hemert

Thanks to everyone who helped in creating this release!


Best,
Ingo

-- 
Ingo Renner
TYPO3 Core Developer, Release Manager TYPO3 4.2, Admin Google Summer of Code

TYPO3 - Open Source Enterprise Content Management System
http://typo3.org

Apache Solr for TYPO3 -
Open Source Enterprise Search meets Open Source Enterprise CMS
http://www.typo3-solr.com