Running Weblogs with Slash

Themes and Plugins

Individual changes are fine, but occasionally someone will create such a work of art that it would be wrong not to share it with the world. Because Slash comes from that Free Software philosophy, it’s adopted the same sort of “share and enjoy” outlook that has lead to the popularity of such organizations as CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/) and Themes.org (http://www.themes.org). The only thing that exceeds the thrill of creating something beautiful is finding out that other people are finding it just as useful. The first step towards mastery, though, is imitation.

Installing Plugins

Any complex program eventually grows to include some sort of plugin functionality.^[43] Like the GIMP, Emacs, Perl, and Mozilla, Slash is also useful out of the box, but its true power is that it allows developers to build bigger and better things the original developers never imagined. This will probably become Slash’s most important feature, as it moves beyond a simple yet powerful weblog program to become a full-powered application server.

Slash has long supported a feature called plugins. The plugin mechanism allows developers to bundle templates, applets, Perl modules, and database dumps together for distribution and installation on different machines. They can be as simple as a single program or as complicated as the standard Journal interface, adding amazing new functionality.

Slash Version 2.2 ships with 10 available plugins, not coincidentally in the plugins/ directory ( ...