README

NAME
    README - Slashdot Readme

DESCRIPTION
    This is the README file for Slash, release 1.0.7. Please read all
    documentation carefully. The various documents explain the database
    schema, the various fields in the database, and some of the reasoning
    behind the design of the schema, installation and setup.

    Please see INSTALL for database upgrade instructions. Code upgrading is
    simple: use the new code in the new distribution, and make sure that you
    have the new values and configurations in your copies of slashdotrc.pl
    and httpd.conf. If you neglect to upgrade these last two, your site
    likely will not work.

    Also, double-check every line of CHANGES to see if anything has changed
    to affect your site (like a change from Mail::Sender to Mail::Sendmail,
    for example).

    Note: This page looks best in a browser (the HTML version of it is in
    the docs/ directory). You can print it out, but some of the ASCII
    illustrations may get munged in printing, but the directions will
    certainly appear good enough to read.

    We have a preliminary Getting Started document at
    public_html/getting_started.shtml. If this is your first time with
    Slash, or you have questions or problems getting started, look here
    first.

    See the Slash web site, with support, docs, latest downloads, FAQs, and
    more, at <URL:http://slashcode.com/>.

    This release is tagged in CVS as v1_0_7_0. See the SourceForge site at
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/ for CVS, bug reporting, patch
    submissions, and downloads.

  What is Slash?

    Maybe this is a dumb question, but why not get this answered? Slash is a
    database-driven news and message board, using mod_perl and MySQL. It has
    been programmed, more so recently, to use persistance for a good deal of
    its variables to increase speed and efficiency. Slash has all the
    features and more that you'd ever want in a bulletin-board/message-board
    system. You can customize it to anything you want, give it any
    appearance that you want. This can mostly be done via data. Slash is a
    database beast in the true sense. The Slash code is distributed under
    the GNU General Public License (see COPYING).

  Hardware/Software

    The live Slashdot used five separate servers for its high hit count.
    This is not a target number for all Slash sites. You can run all of
    Slash on one server, or throw it on 20 servers. The more load you want
    it to handle, the more hardware you'll want. Slash consists of three
    main parts: database, codebase, and web server. How those are divvied up
    amongst servers is up to your own creative planning. Slash runs on Linux
    but is not Linux specific. Whatever runs Apache/mod_perl and MySQL will
    run Slash. Slash does have some MySQL-specific SQL statements contained
    within, but it's not entirely impossible to run it on another RDBMS with
    some modifications.

  Documentation

    Please read the various documents that come with the Slash code (in
    docs/). There's a lot of information that can give you a better idea of
    what the code does, how to install the code, and other information on
    the database schema.

    README
        this document (POD, HTML and plaintext)

    INSTALL
        how to install (POD, HTML and plaintext)

    slasherd.fig
        the ERD diagram of the Slash database schema (use xfig to read it)

    slashtables.html/sdw/ps
        a description of all the tables and columns of the database schema
        (HTML, StarOffice, and PostScript)

  Installation

    See INSTALL.

AUTHOR
    Patrick Galbraith and Chris Nandor. Last Modified July 12, 2000.