Slash builds free portals
Bob Watkins
Published: 03 Oct 2002 14:06 BST
Fortunately, you're not on your own during the install. The full details are described in the Slashcode FAQ. In addition, the following resources are helpful:
- Slashcode.com is itself a Slash site, and its community is very active in helping each other use Slash. Be sure you've read the FAQ thoroughly and the Ask Slashcode stories on the site first. Then, if you're still stuck, submit a story of your own asking for help. You'll be amazed at the timeliness and accuracy of the responses.
- O'Reilly & Associates has an excellent book on Slash called Running Weblogs with Slash. It is well illustrated and describes the customisation and administration process thoroughly.
- "Install Slash for Dummies" isn't part of the Dummies book series, but is a Web article written by someone who documented step-by-step everything he encountered in installing Slash. There are tips and tricks in here not covered by either the Slash FAQ or the O'Reilly book. I highly recommend it.
- Design for Community, by Derek M. Powazek has a chapter on Slash that serves as a great overview of its features from the user's perspective, including an interview with the creator of Slashdot, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. But its most important contribution is its advice on how to nurture discussion in an online community. In fact, this may be the most valuable advice you provide to your clients, over and above the technical aspects of installing the Slash engine.
Offsite hosting tip If you're creating a public Slash site and want to avoid building and hosting it in-house, there are Web hosting companies that specialise in Slash hosting. Check out the Slashcode site for a current list. I don't recommend trying this at a regular Web hosting company: Slash's requirements for server memory and Apache configuration are very precise. It won't work unless it's configured correctly.
Administering a Slash site
Slash's administrative interface is a series of Web forms collectively called BackSlash. Site users who are defined as authors are automatically presented with an administration menu of text links when they log in. The items on the menu vary depending on the security level assigned the author. Some of these items include:
- New allows you to create a new story for the site.
- Stories lets you view the published stories and update them.
- Submissions permits you to view the list of user-suggested stories to set their topic and section, edit the introductions, and approve or reject the stories for publication.
- Sections defines the categories used to subdivide the site, much as a newspaper's sections divide its content. On an intranet, sections might be company departments, such as Human Resources or Help Desk.
- Templates lets you edit the design of the site. Templates are bits of HTML source code that you can find through sites like the Template Toolkit. Templates are easier to create and edit than the underlying Perl code that implements them. You can use templates to define the appearance of the site, and call upon a wide range of predefined variables, such as user preferences, to determine what to display.
- Blocks allows you to edit the static pieces of HTML code displayed on the site, or portal definitions that obtain content from other sites automatically for display.
- Authors lets you define which users are also authors that create, approve, edit, or delete submitted stories and change their properties, such as which section and topic they are assigned.
- Vars allows you to change the variables that control which features of the Slash software are in use and how the site operates.
- Colors lets you affect the overall appearance of the site by determining which foreground and background colors are used to display stories and blocks. This can be varied by section.
Create an opportunity
Slash is a powerful news and discussion engine that is well suited for company intranet deployment, as well as for public Internet information sites. Its portal feature enables automatic updates of information from multiple sources, both inside and outside the company.
Once installed, a Slash site's content is easily administered by the client, although overall administration of the site can earn you repeat work over time. It's an opportunity in disguise for consultants comfortable with Linux, Apache, Perl, and MySQL.
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