Bye Bye, Search Lucene API!

Search has been a passion of mine for some time now. In many ways the Search Lucene API module was my introduction to Drupal and helped me understand and love the platform. Therefore I am somewhat sad to announce that Search Lucene API has reached "end of life".

The reason for this decision is that the Drupal search community is fragmented. If you want to customize the search module you are using, you have to write code that only works for that specific module. Therefore, I feel that maintaining yet another search-centric API does more harm to the community than good since if further divides the contribution pool.

On a positive note, there has been a lot of recent collaboration between the different players in search. I am excited about the opportunity to bridge some of the gaps that are preventing Drupal search from being great, and therefore I am focusing my efforts on projects that are agnostic to the search module being used. Primarily, my focus is on the Facet API module which currently integrates with the core Search, Search API, and Apache Solr Search Integration projects. We are starting to see some returns on this initiative through contributions such as Facet API Block and Collapsible Facets which can be reused with any module that Facet API integrates with.

Going forward I plan on breaking up some of the advancements made in the 7.x-3.x branch of Search Lucene API in to smaller pieces that can be leveraged by other search modules. I set up a project called Search Tools as a container for this initiative, but we are already seeing projects start to rip out pieces on their own which is great. One example is the "custom search pages" functionality added to the the 7.x-1.x branch of Apache Solr Search Integration. Another example is the the Zend Lucene project which integrates the Zend Framework’s PHP port of Lucene as a Search API backend.

Thanks to everyone who supported this project through mentorship, issue queue posts, and patch submissions. It has been a lot of fun working with you on this module, and I look forward to collaborating on other projects going forward.