Slash (Slashdot-Like Automated Storytelling Homepage) is a content management system, originally created for Slashdot, one of the most popular and oldest collaborative sites on the Internet. Slash is often incorrectly called Slashcode, which is the name of the project's web site.
Contents
History
Early versions of Slash were written by Rob Malda, founder of Slashdot, in the spring of 1998. After Andover.net bought Slashdot in June 1999, several programmers were hired to structure the code and render it scalable, as its users had increased from a few hundred to tens of thousands. This work was done by Brian Aker, Patrick Galbraith and Chris Nandor, resulting in version 2 of the software, released in 2001. Until 2009, Slash was maintained by Jamie McCarthy and Chris Nandor, among others. The original codebase was abandoned in September of that year. In 2014, users of Slashdot upset with its acquisition by Dice holdings, forked the website and created SoylentNews. During the initial rollout, developers found that Slash had been largely abandoned, and had compilation problems on modern Linux platforms. Major efforts were made to port the code to work with modern versions of Apache and Perl. The SoylentNews website launched in February of that year. Subsequent improvements made by the SoylentNews team include HTTPS by default, UTF-8 support, and removal of the JavaScript requirement for posting. With Slashdot having long since moved to a different platform, the SoylentNews developers are the de jure maintainers of modern Slash. Slash remains Free software and anyone can contribute to development.
Architecture
Slash is a set of modules, plugins and applets (scripts or programs executed by the server) written in Perl.
Functionality
Slash is aimed at websites with high or very high traffic, which offers excellent performance, both in speed and stability. Its scalability is another of its strengths.