OpenID, the free decentralized indentity and Single Sign On system, is now available for PostNuke. You can use it for doing Single Sign On between all your websites - and even manage secure and restricted access to closed websites via OpenID identities.

Everything began with pnUpper which asserted it's claim to centralize any functionality for file uploads. Particularly of security reasons everything being upload-related should be treated at one single place in the system. With the successor MediaAttach a technically matured module is available in the meantime, the focus changed gradually on file management and integration. Now the first release candidate for the initial version has been released based on technologies in .8 completely.

As you may have read in the past, with the release of PostNuke .8 Final, we plan to have a new downloads interface. We will use Axel's EasyDist module (see a demo here) - enabling you to build a custom package from the ground up, automatically building a compressed archive containing any modules and themes from our extensions database.

Part of this work will involve changing and expanding the extensions database to include new fields. One of these is a category field, which we will use in EasyDist's interface. We could use some help from you defining our category tree - what's the best way to categorise all the modules and themes PostNuke currently has, or might have in the future? We'd like your suggestions; a forum topic to start the discussion is here.

The last 2 years have been quite dull concerning module development - Pagesetter and Mediashare were the only big new modules and some of the older modules only moved very slow. But IMHO this has change since the release of the first Milestone of PostNuke .8

The advantage of PostNuke's module templating system "pnRender" is the fact that you can customize every module. And even if pnForum normally doesn't look like phpBB2 it actually is possible as Franky Chestnust proved on his support site.

Sure - pnForum and PNphpBB2 are the two big players when it comes to forums for PostNuke. But Devin Hayes (invalidresponse) has grown another nice little forum: ElementBB

We all know the problem: Fake accounts with dubious homepage URLs, guestbooks full of spam and every 3 minutes a new spam comment via trackback. While some think that captchas are a soultion, others throw in, that good captchas are an obstacle for users and bad captchas are not means against the OCR features of the latest spam bot generation.

But how can you deal with this flood of vigra ads and homepages advertising exotic sex?

We all know the terrible Typetool that was included into PostNuke some 5 years ago and seemed to be a hopeful candidate for a good WYSISYG-Editor. But others have taken over and now it seems hopelessly outdated.

The German PostNuke Foundation decided to change this and announced a 500€ sponsorship for the one who writes a proper wrapper module for WYSIWYG-Editor. The result today is "scribite!".

An important requirement of many content based PostNuke sites is the ability to freely position content on the frontpage. The position of articles should not only be depending on their chronological order of release but also on the decisions of editors. This has not been possible with the News module but it is possible with Pagesetter and 2 cooperating publication types.

In an effort to raise the awareness and increase adoption of OpenID, US$5,000 will be donated to the first ten software projects that meet the requirements of a bounty program. Currently there are a lot of suggestion but only Joomla seems to have implemented the requirements. Thus there is still a good chance of winning the pot.