Running Weblogs with Slash

The Slash Author Interface

As mentioned earlier, each Slash site has a set of privileged users, called Authors (or Editors), charged with the responsibility of approving and publishing Stories. Some Authors may have additional privileges such as modifying the site’s appearance, deleting user comments, adding or deleting Slashboxes, or regulating the privileges of other Authors.

Note

The phrase Slash site administrator can be a little misleading. There is no special “Administrator” entity in the software, merely Authors of varying levels of privileges. “Slash site administrator” is shorthand for “any of the site’s Authors who has sufficient privileges” for the operation under discussion.

Authors are simply regular users with additional access bestowed by an existing Author with the ability to do so. Thereafter, these users have access to the Author interface (at the relative URL admin.pl), which provides access to site administration functions. Depending on their access level, Authors have an additional row of links to administrative options at the top of the page. The Author interface uses a simpler layout with a grayed-out color scheme to distinguish it from regular pages (see Figure 4-1). Furthermore, a logged-in Author sees special interface elements on every page of the site that do not appear for run-of-the-mill users, such as the Author menu, a row of HTML links to the various pages of the Author interface. The links available in the Author menu vary depending on the privileges ...