An idea long nurished in our minds is finally ready for publication: we release IntegerNet_Solr Free, a completely free Solr integration for Magento. This extension makes it easy for everyone to set up Solr as a product search in a Magento online store.

Why do we offer a free Solr integration for Magento?

The Magento community is a vivid environment, a sphere of almost infinite resources, help and advise. Think StackExchange, Slack channels, meetups and hackathons. But this community naturally depends on individuals and companies willing to give back, to analyse problems, write answers, offer feedback, organise meetings and write entire extensions. We love what the community does for others and for us. We experience first hand that their efforts help us in our daily lives. Now is our time to give back. We know our way around Magento and Solr whereas for many Magento developers Solr is something completely new and rather tricky to integrate. Our mission is to free all Magento developers from the fear of Solr integrations. We don’t know if this is already a scientifically recognized specific phobia. If it is, the cure is now available.

Why now?

Since this is a version of our extension that you can use free of charge, we do not offer individual support. In order to still be able to provide this free version with peace of mind, we waited until our extension has become as stable and reliable as it is today. Last winter, our Solr extension for Magento saw a major overhaul with a refactoring of the complete code, improvements of its structure and revisions of its logic for a framework agnostic approach.

We see ourselves as reliable extension providers and, therefore, we commit ourselves to continue the general support for the extension, releasing updates in the future, etc. If you use IntegerNet_Solr Free and encounter a bug, we invite you to open GitHub issue. You can download it immediately from GitHub.

Features

The extension is meant as a first step in the field of product search improvement for any growing online store. With a complete documentation and a Solr server configuration, you have your Solr powered Magento search up and running in no time.

All catalog search results are then provided by Solr, which is a lot faster than Magento‘s standard MySQL search. Also, the separate Solr server takes the load from search queries away from your store’s server. That means one bottleneck less to worry about.

Anyone thinking about improving a store’s product search knows that fuzzy search is needed. It’s an essential feature of any product search that helps your customers find what they are looking for in spite of typos.

Product search can also be used as a marketing tool. Use it to promote certain products that will make your store surpass its own sales goals. IntegerNet_Solr Free allows you to boost certain products and attributes, so you can either promote any products showing a match of search query and a certain attribute or fine-tune your search to boost a selection of products.

The whole extension is unencrypted. You are welcome to take it as starting point and further develop your own Solr extension from there. To help you do that, the extension includes a number of events you can use to modify the extension’s behaviour. To help you get started with modifications and events, take a lot at our blog post on IntegerNet_Solr’s events.

Differences to IntegerNet_Solr Pro

If your store needs more advanced features, e.g. an extensive autosuggest window, fast loading of product lists on category pages via Solr, multiselect filters in your layered navigation, Solr for Magento Enterprise, or if you wish to have direct support from the extension’s developers, then our IntegerNet_Solr Pro version is right for you.

More about IntegerNet_Solr Pro