After the plannings for this year's meeting (23th and 24th of August 2008) had started a few weeks ago (as we reported), we can finally publish first procedure aspects. As usual there will also be a kick-off event on friday evening (the 22th) this time. We won't have a private barbeque this time though, but move a little and indulge in the wines of Bingen from a winemaker afterwards.

I'm glad to report that Google has announced the projects accepted for the Summer of Code 2008. PostNuke has had four students allocated, who are undertaking projects from our ideas page: a new search module, categories module changes, usability enhancements and a revisions control system.

We hope to publish a short interview with each student over the next few days. Meanwhile, today marks the start of the community bonding period, which students should use to get to know the project and what makes PostNuke so great. Please make them feel welcome.

The four students accepted are Daniel Byrd, Carlos Fernandez, Prevel Mathieu and John Pritchard. You can read the abstracts of the project proposals on the Google SoC website.

There's a lot going on at the moment which is not visible to everybody. I would like to summarize some of the developments in this article.

This year the German PostNuke association is arranging a meeting which happens in late summer as usual. After Frank Schummertz (landseer) has already organized all four pnMeetings, I have the honour of scheduling the first meeting under the new name. Both users and developers alike are openly invited to become acquainted with each other and exchange experiences about their past and future work with our favourite framework.

In preparation for the rebranding of PostNuke under the system's new name, the Steering Committee are looking to get in contact with all international community webmasters. The PostNuke Software Foundation has purchased the domains for all major international communities, and are we are looking to assign these domains to well established community support websites.

If you currently run an international support website, we ask that you contact the Steering Committee (use the contact form
The PostNuke Software Foundation will retain ownership of all international domains, and will point the nameserver records to the external servers of community webmasters. There are conditions which must be adhered to when running a community website under the new branding, and applicants will be informed of these via email.

Are you tired of remembering all those passwords for your different websites? Or would you like to be able to sign a weblog comment securely - without others being able to spoof it? Maybe you should get yourself a shining new online identity using OpenID.

The PostNuke team would like to announce its newest member. Many of you know him as nestormateo on the PostNuke forums where he has been very active. Lately, he has been active sharing ideas and concepts on the development of our software. He has been helping with bugs, patches, and general quality of the project. Mateo has been sharing and contributing both publicly and behind the scenes. All of us are very glad to have him aboard. For his introduction, we decided to conduct an interview and it is my honor to have conducted it, as a friend and colleague.

As the year draws to a close, it's time to review the progress PostNuke has made and look forward to what's in store for 2008. This year has been a big one for PostNuke - we've seen the release of 0.8 MS3, RC1 and RC2, development on the .9 branch was started with the reorganisation of the project's SVN repository and the process of deciding on, and registering a new name was started and is drawing to a conclusion as I write this.

With the release last week of RC2, it's about time for an update on the PostNuke project. In this update:

• RC2 Bugfixing / Bug Fix Weekend #2
• International Communities Request
• Teams and Call for Volunteers
• Module Developer's List - A Reminder
• New on 0.9, Language System Redevelopments
• Web Links Needs a New Home

This is the first article from a series of upcoming reports about the work of the Steering Committee (SC). At the moment the SC plans to meet on a weekly basis (each Tuesday night depending on our availability) via Skype conference.

Here is the result of the recent chats.