Slashcode

Those of you following CVS closely: don't do incautious updates in the near future. We're going to be committing a large chunk of code all at once, very soon now, and we guarantee it will break your site if you install it. Bear with us while we get everything up to speed. In a couple of weeks everything will be humming along smoothly.

(We're overhauling the section and topic system, replacing it with something more flexible.)

Last night we sprinkled a trace amount of holy penguin pee on the CVS tag T_2_3_0_151 and pronounced it to also be our latest R_ tag, R_2_3_0_151. This is the latest R_ tag since _113, which was many weeks ago. (If you missed the memo, "T" is for testing and "R" is for releases. We still haven't dubbed anything "Slash 2.3.0" yet, but that's mostly because we're lazy.)

We feel pretty good about the stability of _151, it's been running on Slashdot for a couple of weeks and there are no real problems.

The big change, committed shortly after _151, is the switch from users.pl to login.pl for authentication and related operations. That seems to be working but it hasn't been tested enough to merit an R_ yet. In fact, this may be the last R_ tag that we do for a while, since there are big changes that will be committed in the weeks to come which will put the damper on R'ing.

Here's the CVS tree if you want to browse, and here are the instructions to download:

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/  slashcode login
CVS password: (hit return, there is no password)
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/  slashcode co slash
(much activity)
$ cd slash
$ cvs update -r R_2_3_0_151 -dP

Recently I was asked by a heavily trafficed website to investigate migrating their site to Slash. After downloading the latest codebase I'm reliving a lot of the installation frustrations experienced when I messed around with Slash over a year ago. I've installed lots of portals before like PhpBB, Nuke, MX-System etc. All of those installs were pain free. I'm writing to request that you guys simply the install process. How about some straight forward docs? I would suggest a list of required packages and then simple instructions how to get Slash working with Apache etc that comes with most distros.

How do I modify the list of slashboxes that appear on the right side of the default page? I see that they are included using this line from the template "index;index;default":

[% boxes %]

How do I control the way boxes is assigned? The comment in the template reads:

boxes = string containing all the slashboxes.

I suppose that I could just hardwire it into this template but that seems to be the wrong idea. Is this referring to a database table? If so, which one? Or is it referring to a Perl function? If so which one?

wiswaud notes: "Following this article in A List Apart, which rewrites (statically) a Slashdot homepage from HTML tables to CSS/XHTML, what are the chances we'll see this implemented in Slash? ALA calculates that this might bring savings of 10GB of bandwidth PER DAY, while making each reload a little faster for everyone. It would also make Slash-generated pages more accessible, as CSS makes it possible to show as little or as much formatting as a device supports. Furthermore, while I've never delved into the Slash, I would tend to think that, while it might be quite an endeavour to do the conversion, the code would actually end up being clearer and easier to follow, as the formatting would be separated from the content..." Well, wiswaud -- looks like some one agrees with you. For those interested in a new CSS-aware theme for Slash...read on.