The IOP has ambitious plans for its digital experience. We produce a wide range of information and content across a number of different platforms and wanted a search solution that would ensure that our broad range of users would find easy to use and that would meet their needs effectively. It is also absolutely crucial to us that the site meets high accessibility as well as performance standards. We are delighted that SearchStax has been able to deliver that for us.
Liz North
Head of Communications & Marketing
The Institute of Physics (IOP) is a UK-based professional organization and learned society for the UK and Ireland that serves to inspire people to develop their knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of physics. Founded in 1874, the IOP is a worldwide community of over 20,000 professionals and supports physics in education, research and industry through career advice, policy statements and professional development opportunities.
The IOP has just delivered phase one of a new digital platform that aims to offer a high-quality, seamless user experience to a wide range of audiences – from the physics curious to those at the cutting-edge of the discipline. This new platform has focused on using technology that can enable information to be drawn together to meet those different user needs.
The IOP therefore required a robust, comprehensive and extensive multi-site search facility to deliver large amounts of indexable pages from several disparate content sites. The previous website was hosted on AWS and they realized that Drupal native search would not be able to meet their advanced feature requirements. In response, the IOP team initiated a project to identify and implement a new performant search infrastructure that could grow with them.
IOP requires a robust, comprehensive and extensive multi-site search facility for their Drupal 8 website. Their previous website was hosted on AWS and Drupal native search would not be able to meet their advanced feature requirements. The two key must-have requirements were faceted search and compliance with WCAG 2.0 accessibility requirements. Other should-have features include the ability of search to return all pages including those behind a login, weighting of some results so they return higher, “did you mean” search suggestions, indexing different types of content including PDFs, search synonyms and spell check.
After looking at different search options including Drupal native search, IOP recognized that only Apache Solr and ElasticSearch would meet the advanced features with functionality that is available out-of-the box. In the end, IOP selected Solr as the search facility because it is more mature in the Drupal space, is relatively easy to implement compared to ElasticSearch and has a large and active open source community.
IOP implemented a performant and high availability dedicated hosted Solr cluster with a Gold support plan for their production environment and two single node Solr environments for staging and development. This configuration will give IOP the Solr foundation to support their current and future needs.
Using SearchStax Cloud, IOP was able to deliver an MVP search facility from start to finish within two weeks and included themed search results, indexing of all selected content types, faceted search, synonyms and spell-check.
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