I am pleased to announce that earlier this afternoon, DotNetNuke Blog 04.01.00 passed the final checks in the community release tracker and is now officially released. Blog 4.1.0 will be included with DotNetNuke 05.06.02 which is due out mid march. In the meantime, you can download 4.1 directly from CodePlex. The blog team is now moving full steam ahead on the many changes we have planned for the 05.00.00 release which we expect to coincide with the launch of DotNetNuke 06.00.00.
As previously announced, Blog 5.0 will include dependencies on several features coming in DotNetNuke 6.0. One of the major changes coming in DotNetNuke 6.0 is an updated UI. The blog team will be working hard to make sure that Blog 5.0 supports the new UI standards of DotNetNuke 6.0. Not only will this help to provide a more unified experience between the blog and the core framework, it will also help other module developers who can use the blog module as a reference for how to take advantage of the new core UI enhancements.
In addition, we are looking to integrate support for Active Social Journaling. Since it is uncertain as to whether the journaling feature will be ready for inclusion in DotNetNuke 6.0, Blog support for this feature may wait until the 5.1 release. One of the great benefits of having Active Social Journaling in the core framework is that modules, like blog, can leverage the journal for publishing notices to Twitter and other supported social networks. This is an important piece of functionality that we removed in Blog 4.1. Rather than continue to tightly integrate Twitter support, we felt it was better to take advantage of a framework like Active Social that allows a more pluggable approach to publishing status information to various social networks.
Moving forward we will continue to look for ways to decouple the core blog module from external services so that users can plug in whatever services they choose. Whether it is support for external comment systems like Disqus, or support for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn notifications, or even support for storing blog images on a service like Amazon S3, we feel it is important for the blog module to focus on core blog functionality and to allow users to plug in peripheral services. This will allow us to support more services without being tightly bound to the release schedule of the core blog module. This focus will also allow our users to truly create a blog that best suits their particular needs.