Hi Tom,
I would recommend as I have in other posts that you take a look at Ventrian's News Articles module. Many people use News Articles for their blog and it supports comments and ratings and is stated to have support for Trackbacks, althought I haven't tested Trackbacks myself.
Related to your previous post, you make some valid points and I'm sorry to hear of your frustration. I feel many of the same frustrations and I've been programming for a while now. Here's the thing about DotNetNuke, which should, by the way, in no way invalidate your feelings. DotNetNuke is an Open Source platform, supported by a community of volunteers who put their own time and energy into the development of the platform products for free. Antonio and the other project leads aren't paid for the hours of support they provide both in the forums and in the form of new features that they write on their own time as a way to give back to the community. They do this as a way to give back to the community for the incredible set of features you get for free, or, in some cases, as a way to pay it forward, realizing that others will following and continue to provide excellent support for an evolving platform that thousands of organizations have implemented as their CMS. Over the years, I've had the chance to work with a number of the other open source CMS platforms out there and my experience with each platform is the same. The core platforum is usually relativley stable, but support for modules and add-ons is hit and miss. This is due in part to the fact that at the module level it's hard to anticipate how a module will be used by a large community, and supporting a feature set that can accomodate this level of expectation by such a large group of people is something that even commercial software companies struggle with, and they're making money to fund their work!
So, here's how I encourage people to look at DotNetNuke. DNN is a CMS platform, with, I believe, one of the best infrastructures available in the CMS market (both open source and commercial). When I suggest to a client that they use DotNetNuke, I expect to make use of third party modules which are supported by developers with an incentive to provide excellent support and to stay current with new and innovative features. The DNN community has encouraged this, and I believe this is another aspect of DotNetNuke that sets it apart from many other open source CMS platforms out there. With DNN, there is the expectation for many of us that we can take the money we saved our client (in some cases upwards of $50,000) and funnel that into a vibrant community of developers who sell professional modules designed to fill in the gaps. The one downside I see to the community at this point is that the pricing for many modules on the market is way too low. I understand the issue. It's hard to sell a module for $500 when it runs on a free platform. But for long term viability, you want your module developers making enough money so that as their user base grows, they have the resources to continue to provide adequate support.
Well, I'm certainly not going to solve these problems by sitting here writing a long post, but I wanted to highlight for other readers who follow what I believe is a healthy perspective on the whole open source CMS scene. I look at it like this, open source works really well for what I call platform level software, things like operating systems (Linux), CRMs (Sugar CRM and Splendid CRM) and CMSs (DotNetNuke, Drupal, Plone, Mambo, Joomla, Xoops and others). But the model doesn't seem to work as well when you branch off into specific applications or modules that run on the platform. It's not that it doesn't work, it's just that the expectations have to be set accordingly. The feature to man hour ratio at this level is much higher, which means that you usually end up with a lower number of features. For many, this is just fine. They just want simple FAQs, nothing fancy. For many others, this isn't enough, and that's where commercial modules come in.
Well, I'm repeating myself and I'm sure you already know all this, but just thought I would make these thoughts available to others who stumble upon this thread.
Best regards,
Don