What’s Inside

Chapter 1, Slash: an Overview, begins with an overview of weblogging and Slash. It describes the history of Slashdot, examines the Slash interface from a user’s perspective, and gives a big picture overview of the rest of the book.

Chapter 2, Installing Slash, walks through the Slash installation process. This includes information on the software prerequisites (Perl, Apache, MySQL) and discusses common configurations.

Chapter 3, Basic Administration, takes a first look at the administrative menus. It begins by helping an administrator delegate power and authority and also demonstrates basic Slash customization.

Chapter 4, Editing and Updating Stories, examines the story selection and publishing features. It includes the common convenience functions that have grown up over the years.

Chapter 5, Reviewing and Approving Submissions, describes the process of publishing Stories recommended by users. Slash has several little-known features for sorting, winnowing, and queueing Stories, all listed here.

Chapter 6, Comments, Filters, and Content Moderation, explores the powerful comment and moderation systems in detail. This includes the underlying formulas and functions of moderation and meta-moderation. Yikes.

Chapter 7, Managing Topics and Sections, looks at how Slash groups related Stories. This has implications for site organization and future expandability.

Chapter 8, Managing a Slash Community, takes a philosophical approach, listing several important questions to answer before a site grows too large. Any successful site must overcome common traps and troubles. Those that can be predicted are presented here.

Chapter 9, Basic Site Customization, continues with a foray into site customization. It discusses blocks (those odd boxes in the right and left margins of a site), automatic content retrieval from other sites, and user polls.

Chapter 10, Advanced Customization, continues the configuration track, examining blocks and colors yet again. It then delves into practical territory, modifying templates, installing themes, and even creating and installing an example plugin. The chapter finishes with a brief discussion of the Slash features that make internationalization both possible and tricky.

Chapter 11, Advanced Administration, concludes the configuration approach, dissecting Slash conventions and utilities. It includes a bestiary of the common daemons that keep a site running. Finally, it describes the form and function of recurring tasks.

Appendix A, Slash Architecture, is a blueprint to Slash’s grand Gothic structure.

Appendix B, Common Slash Database Tables, outlines the schemas for the most important tables in a Slash system.

Appendix C, The Slash Template Language, is a gentle introduction to the template language used in Slash. It describes the powerful Template Toolkit features most commonly found in standard Slash templates.

Appendix D, The Slash API, categorizes several common functions and methods available to Slash plugins, tasks, and applets.

Appendix E, Slash Configuration Variables, lists and explains the default Slash configuration variables.

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