How Information Is Displayed
All of the HTML rendered in user agents comes from templates. Templates
themselves are the core of the display system, determining the look and feel of
the site. Template logic all lives in the
Slash::Display
module and the
slashDisplay
function, which are described in Section D.4 in Appendix D. Templates are called either directly from
applets or from widgets. Widgets are a holdover from earlier versions of
Slash (found in the Slash
module, where elephants
go to die). In modern versions, widgets are used only for drawing boxes with
the fancybox
template. For example, to draw a sidebar box on a
page, use the Slash::templatebox
function, passing the
name of the template to use. Similar calls exist for creating Poll Booth and
portald Slashboxes.
To improve performance, templates are compiled and cached. The cache keeps
only a set number of compiled templates in memory. This can be controlled by
the template_cache_size
configuration variable. One final
note: the template language attribute is currently unused. It is intended to
support internationalization, which is not yet complete.
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