Blog 5.0 scrapped Recent Entries in favour of using the Journal module for that purpose. I am trying to use Journal as a replacement and have learned a few interesting things one might want to know before upgrading from 4.1.1 to 5.0.

In the Journal module, you turn off all the source options except for Blog, and then you get just the Blog module items listed. If you type in a Blog Summary, instead of letting it auto-generate, that summary (complete with pictures if you add them) will appear in the Journal module. You can let the full blog posting be auto-generated for the Summary by setting the Blog control panel option to 0 for "Limit Auto-Generated Entry Summary to:" and it will not appear in the Journal.

The the blog posting Title and Author are always listed in the Journal, along with the poster's photo icon and the time. If you want to turn any of those off, you can do it with CSS changes. I chose to make those changes in the page settings, adding css to the header so that use of the Journal module on other pages would not be affected. If you want to type in a blog Summary but not have it displayed in the Journal module for "Recent Entries" you can also disable that section with "display: none" CSS. Using CSS this way however, still encurs the download time of the summary, with the CSS just telling the browser to not display it.

What would be nice is if the Journal module had an option for "Show detail" to control whether you saw the Summary or just the Title, more like the NewsFeed module has. Better yet, a template option would be nice like Blog 4.x module had for the "Recent Blog Entries Settings" so you can control which items are shown and what their HTML is.

Also, if you edit a blog posting and re-post it, the Journal updates to show the entry as being published just now. While you can go into the database for the Journal table and manually change the date back to the date of the original posting, it is not convenient. So make sure your blog edits are right before you post the entry the first time.

I would like to propose changes to the Journal module, or even see if the developers are thinking about any of this. However, I can't seem to find a Forum like this one for the Journal module. Perhaps that's because it is part of the core... I don't know. But if you know where the discussion about Journal features is taking place, please let me know. Thanks.