README - Slashdot Readme
This is the README file for Slash, release 1.0.9. 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_9_0. See the SourceForge site at <http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/> for CVS, bug reporting, patch submissions, and downloads.
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).
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.
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)
See INSTALL.
Patrick Galbraith and Chris Nandor. Last Modified Thursday, October 5, 2000.