No, not hacking as in ``breaking and entering'', but hacking as in ``figure it out, see how it works, change it to do what you want, and understand it'' hacking. This section will explain the overall design of Scoop, and the major functions that will help you in programming it. This does not by any means cover everything there is to know about Scoop. The only way to figure all that out is to read all of the code. Luckily, most of the modules have perlpod in them, so you can 'perldoc Module.pm' to get more information about its functions.
This summary will give an overview of the $S object first, then go into detail about specific parts of scoop, Stories, Polls, Permissions, RDFs, etc.