Customizing Template Behavior

There’s much more to Slash templates than changing text output options. A common modification is adding banner ads to a site. Again, Slash’s roots with Slashdot make this easy. Even site administrators responsible for internal sites can find some helpful ideas for further template editing.

Banner Ads

Many popular ad management packages have sprung up. There are several popular Apache modules for this purpose, including mod_random and Adfu. One, mod_adbanners, was written by Kurt Gray specifically for OSDN (neé Andover.net) sites, and works very well with Slash. It is available for download at http://modadbanners.sourceforge.net/. Installation of an Apache module is relatively simple. Follow the compilation directions in Section 2.4.3 in Chapter 2 and in the INSTALL file.[41]

After the module is installed and httpd.conf has been modified per the installation instructions, restart the web server to test the configuration. When everything works, you then must edit the configuration file for the site which will run banner ads. For firewheel, this file is /usr/local/slash/site/firewheel/firewheel.conf. Copy the contents of the docs/httpd.conf.example file provided with the module into the configuration file, changing the file paths as appropriate for your system.

Next, copy the data and ad files to their proper destinations. The .dat files from /usr/local/adsystem/dat/ will go to the directory named in the AddBanner directive. The ads in /usr/local/adsystem/htdocs/banner/ ...

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