You should definitely also consider Efficion's Articles module. It supports many of the items on your list.

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David O'Leary
Efficion Consulting

DigArticle 3.0 was released today - quite a few new features.  Finally a DNN news module with article flow!  You can check out release notes here.

I checked out the core blog module for the first time in a few years. It has changed a bit. Not too bad if all you need is a simple blog module with one or limited authors.

I am working on the news section of my project right now.  And since I keep running into new things I want to do I am still a little bit up in the air as to which way to go.

I have always used Ventrian News Articles (NA) and really like the flexibility that Scott's extensive list of tokens provides but NA suffers from one major downfall that is a showstopper for me. That is the fact that it doesn't have a separate detail view module.  In NA the article details are either shown in an admin skin or within the main module. I had worked around this for some time by putting the main module in a hidden page and using the NA Latest Article module for all display but some of the custom things I now want to do prohibit this.  Having been coded in 2003/2004 NA is one of the oldest modules available for DNN that still works but I think it may be time for Scott to rewrite it and modernize it's basic structure.

So I think that as of this post my choice is DigArticle.

Mike @ DigArticle has been adding new features at a much faster rate than any of the others (Release Notes). Some of the recently added features:

• Added the ability to grab the category for a new article from the querystring. (Dig is only one that does this)
• Added the ability to import Atom feeds as well as RSS feeds (To my knowledge Dig is the only one that can do this)
• Added the ability to make the detail view module show just one article in it's entirety. (Turns detail view module into a display module)
• Auto RSS discovery
• Article Flow which is a very handy mgmt feature and time saver. Now has three different date selections including date range.

Other factors weighing on my decision include:

• I'm not feeling real warm and fuzzy on the future development of the Metapost module.  Many of us know the downsides of having a module get discontinued or die on the vine thereby stranding us. This is why many people will only use third party modules if they can buy the source code. DigArticle has it's own version (DigMeta) built in. That is one less developer I am reliant on.  All the other  blog modules I'm considering use MetaPost.
• DigArticle has the best media management and uploading features - by a pretty significant margin in my opinion.  I hate the old DNN file picker type setup where your visitors can see more than you would like them too.
• DigArticle is the only one that has both article and comment voting. I like voting better than rating because it is an easier way to get people to interact.

At this point I think the only thing DigArticle is missing is custom fields.  Once that happens I do believe I will have found my perfect blog/news module.  I am going to be doing some neat things in my news section which I plan to share with the community via a blog or two.