SlashGlossary

CssWork parent of this page

Glossary of terms used in slash code

These an be confusing if you are new to slash code. Try to keep these to one displayed line, this is not for full descriptions.

• D1 - The orgiginal Slash interface
• D2 - The new fancy interface that we have disabled on Soylent.
• Authors - Authors approve submissions, have the authority to change the look of the site, and can moderate.
• Comments - Users may write comments about a story.
• firehose - The Firehose is a collection of content from anywhere on the site that users can vote on and tag.

• nexus - a special kind of topic (which we call a topic_nexus when we want to emphasize that it is both). And the non-display aspects of sections -- mainly, the "section_extras" data which ensured that stories in Book Reviews stored a field for ISBN -- were sent over to nexuses.
• plugins -

• readers - readers are people who request pages on the site, if they are logged in they become users, if not they become anonymous coward users if they post.
• Sections & Topics - Seem similar. Sections are similar to the way a newspaper is laid out, i.e.: business section, sports section, local section, etc. Topics can appear anywhere, share similar concepts. The home page has stuff from all sections. (AG note - this now not entirely correct)
• Stories - Stories reside in the middle section of the page and have the intro-text of the stories along with the authors and what departments they are from.
• Submissions - Stories are submitted by users, and then approved by authors.
• skin - from 'sectiontopics' :
  • So "section" has been split into two: "skin" and "nexus". *Most* of the information that went with a section was used to describe appearances, and that went over to skin. So a skin now controls color (through the skin_colors table), it controls which templates are used (the final part of a template's three-part name is now skin, not section), and it controls with which other stories a story is grouped (on which index page). And the non-display aspects of sections -- mainly, the "section_extras" data which ensured that stories in Book Reviews stored a field for ISBN -- were sent over to nexuses.
  • Each skin has precisely one nexus; you can think of a skin as drawing its stories from its nexus. The clever part is that a nexus is just a special kind of topic (which we call a topic_nexus when we want to emphasize that it is both). So if a story has both the Developers topic_nexus, and the Book Reviews topic_nexus, then it will appear on both books.slashdot.org and developers.slashdot.org. And the additional data stored with the story will include the union of all the "extras" data -- not only ISBN and so on, but also any "extras" data that may be in the Developers nexus. There don't actually happen to be any extras for Developers on Slashdot, so maybe this isn't the best example, but if there were, a story that was categorized into both nexuses would include that data too.

• tagboxes
• tasks - periodic tasks run by slashd like cron jobs.
• template - html that is parsed by the Perl Template Toolkit. part of a theme
• theme - "A theme is a website design."

• Users - Users are registered to use the site, all other visitors are logged as Anonymous.