The Solr Usability Contest has finished. It run for four weeks, has received 29 suggestions, 113 votes and more than 300 visits. People from several different Solr communities participated.
The final list of suggestions (sorted by votes) is:
It has been just over a week since launching Solr Usability Contest. It is doing well. There are 25 suggestions, more than 150 visits, and quite a number of votes.
The most popular suggestion so far is Better Documentation. This is both easy to predict and a bit sad. From my own experience, there is quite a bit of documentation about Solr on the web, but it might be a little hard to find. Some of the best stuff actually hides in videos and slideshows, so may not even be easily visible to Google. And then, there are books - also not indexable (see relevant suggestion). Some of those books are quite comprehensive. And, of course, for the advanced material, the source code is self-documenting on the most basic level, yet again not something Google can search effectively (use other search engines for that).
In collaboration with Packt Publishing and to celebrate the release of my new book Instant Apache Solr for Indexing Data How-to, we are organizing a contest to collect Solr Usability ideas.
I had to set up Apache Solr 4 on Windows as a service using Jetty container. The following is the documentation on how to do it. I am not saying that this is the best way to get it to work. But it is one way that works and seems to be more recent and more comprehensive than the other approaches I found.