Running Weblogs with Slash

Chapter 7. Managing Topics and Sections

Any identifiable net community has at least one common interest, and individual members have their own unique likes and needs. Slash provides several tools by which users can adapt site presentation to their liking. To achieve this, site Authors and administrators have to provide sufficient metainformation. One such category is the classification of Stories into Topics and Sections. As mentioned in Section 1.3.1 in Chapter 1, this allows users to view or exclude Stories by category.

The site theme will govern the necessary Topics and Sections. The default Slash theme includes three Sections (Articles, Features, and Slash) and four Topics (Slash, Slashdot, News, and Linux). This chapter explains how and why to replace or to supplement the default categories.

Managing Topics

The Topics link appears in the Admin menu for Authors with a seclev of 10,000. It links to the Topics Editor page (see Figure 7-1). A pop-up menu at the top of the form lists the currently defined Topics by name. Choose any Topic and click Select Topic to edit it. This will reload the same page with the Topic information, including the currently selected Topic image.

Figure 7-1. The Topics Editor page

Topic Attributes

Slash automatically assigns Topics unique identifiers, used internally. These values are not appropriate for display purposes, so the Short Name field ...