If you are serious about Drupal search, then you are probably aware of the fantastic integration between Drupal and Apache Solr - the open source search server based on the Apache Lucene search library. The Apache Solr Integration module offers some very straightforward instructions on replacing the core Drupal search with Apache Solr (the same search server that powers drupal.org and www.whitehouse.gov).  And in replacing core search, the Apache Solr Integration module devlivers pretty much exactly what you would want and expect, such as:

1. Faceted search
2. Replacing taxonomy pages with Solr search
3. Result biasing
4. Content biasing and exclusion
5. The list goes on and on...

But what happens when your requirements are a bit more complicated than just replacing core search?  

I've planned to write this article for quite a while, not to profess my love for Drupal, the open source PHP-based web content management system, but to discuss some of Drupal’s weaknesses and scenarios where Drupal isn’t the best fit. Many of these ideas are relevant to other open source and vendor web content solutions as well.

Because there’s a lot to talk about, this is the first in a 3-part series.

Most of my colleagues know that I'm a big proponent of open source software and particularly of Drupal. I started freelancing and building sites with Drupal during the early days of Drupal 5 and have found it to be a great platform for building content-managed sites in many cases. Fast forward 4 years and we at CapTech are running large scale, enterprise projects implementing Drupal.

Also exciting, over the past year or so, Drupal has started to gain more popularity among the "independent" analysts, seeing frequent mentions from Gartner and Forrester.

CapTech's monthly Drupal Team meeting is today, February 9, 2011, and we are excited about opening up the meeting to the Richmond, VA area Drupal community.  As anyone that frequents the Richmond group at groups.drupal.org knows, there isn't an official Richmond Drupal Users Group.  Open source is all about community involvement, and we'd like to work with the Richmond Drupal community to raise the level of awareness around Drupal for prospective buyers, sellers, Drupal developers in central Virginia. We'd also like to discuss creating an "official" Richmond Drupal Users Group.

Let's say you want to use a single Drupal install to run your company's primary web site and your company's blog site (multisite), but you also have different themes and navigation hierarchies for the two sites. Sure, there are some Drupal modules that may provide most of this functionality. However, you can accomplish exactly the same thing with a plain vanilla Drupal install and the Pathauto module (a module that you should really be using anyways).