The PMC would like to engage the Solr user community for feedback on an extensive redesign of the Solr Reference Guide I've just committed to the master (future 9.0) branch.
You can see the new design from our Jenkins build of master: https://builds.apache.org/view/L/view/Lucene/job/Solr-reference-guide-master/javadoc/ The hope is that you will receive these changes positively. If so, we'll use this for the upcoming 8.6 Ref Guide and future releases. We also may re-publish earlier 8.x versions so they use this design. I embarked on this project last December simply as an attempt to upgrade the version of Bootstrap used by the Guide. After a couple of days, I'd changed the layout entirely. In the ensuing few months I've tried to iron out the kinks and made some extensive changes to the "backend" (the CSS, JavaScript, etc.). I'm no graphic designer, but some of my guiding thoughts were to try to make full use of the browser window, improve responsiveness for different sized screens, and just give it a more modern feel. The full list of what has changed is detailed in the Jira issue if you are interested: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-14173 This is Phase 1 of several changes. There is one glaring remaining issue, which is that our list of top-level categories is too long for the new design. I've punted fixing that to Phase 2, which will be an extensive re-consideration of how the Ref Guide is organized with the goal of trimming down the top-level categories to only 4-6. SOLR-14444 will track phase 2. One last thing to note: this redesign really only changes the presentation of the pages and some of the framework under the hood - it doesn't yet add full-text search. All of the obstacles to providing search still exist, but please know that we fully understand frustration on this point and still hope to fix it. I look forward to hearing your feedback in this thread. Best, Cassandra
