Hey Guys, thanks again for the interest. Here's an update, however, it's not the good news I've been hoping to post.  I truly thought I was nearing a release, and in fact demo'd much of the code to other DNN team and Corp members at OpenForce in November. Since then a number of things have happened. My "day" job became a bottleneck. As you can understand, the tough economy has required that I cut my development team in half and of course the workload has not been reduced accdordingly, so "free" time to spend on the Repository has been tough to find. Secondly, I have been targetting DNN 5.x as the minimum code base for version 4, and I've spent some time over the past month working with the Corp to understand where they are going with some of the core functionality that will affect my module.  In fact, there has been a lot of discussion lately about a 'module developer's toolkit' and taking some of the repository 4 functionality such as the template engine, workflow, comments, ratings which have all been architected as reusable components and moving them from the repository module code base into a reusable 'toolkit' for all module developers to use.  So, as you can see I've hit a crossroads where some tough choices have to be made.  I can continue developing my module and go down that familiar road, however I believe one of our (DNN project teams) main problems is that we don't work closely enough together and we each architect and build our own solutions with far too much overlap in terms of functionality and technology. We should be working together on common components so all modules that want to support comments will use the same comment component resulting in the same UI and interaction,  resulting in a more consistent look and feel across all modules. 

Antonio (blog) and I have spent some time talking about this and in fact we started a discussion with the entire core team a few weeks ago about this very fact. There is a lot of work being done by Nik for DNN 5.x regarding widgets and APIs for common components. We have started to look at our core modules to identify the overlap of functionality, how many templating solutions, how many comment solutions, look at what each provides and (hopefully) come up with a single component for each area that includes the best features and tech of each of them.  The results should be exciting, a new core project of reusable components and tech that all module developers can use (think of the AJAX toolkit as an example). All of our modules will be better for it. Development time will be decreased and our DNN web sites will be have a more consistent feel for our end users.

So, back to the question, what does that mean for the Repository module? I think it's all good news. The architecture will change somewhat as it will be the poster child for this new toolkit. But the functionality will remain the same as the vision I've had since the beginning of the rewrite. I want this next verison to be the module that allows you to build modules without programming, package and share those 'repository applications'. I am particularly proud of the template engine and that will be the first component to be moved from my module base into the new toolkit. I am not sure yet about the public availability of the toolkit, all I can say is that the Corp and the project teams are all behind the concept. I hope to be able to blog and post more info shortly.

In the meantime, I am once again going to look to the community and attempt to build a team. You may or may not know, but for most of it's life, the Repository module has been a one man show. I know that's not an ideal situation and I've tried a couple of times to recruit additional developers from the community to help me, and both times that failed miserably. People are enthusiatic to volunteer however in every case so far, once they join the team their contributions have been zero.  As the time that I can spend of the project has dwindled, it is clear to me that once again I need to turn to the community for assistance. I hope very much that there is a talented, committed developer or two out there that will raise their hand and be willing to work with me on this module.  I will post a separate call for volunteers to join my team in the next day or two and we'll see what happens.

Hopefully, while this is probably not the response you were hoping for, you will be excited to see that the Repository module is not dead, in fact it should be the poster boy for module development going forward. I am excited about the *slight* turn in direction, I had always kept the idea of reusable components and technology in mind as I was writing the code for version 4 with the hopes that it would eventually lead to a module developer's toolkit, and that that toolkit would help all of us going forward in our module development efforts.

In terms of releases, I would expect that you will start seeing 'parts' of the Repository 4 module being released prior to the whole module. I can forsee the template engine being released separately, then the workflow component along with reusable components for comments, ratings and categories.  Finally, the Repository version 4 will be released which will use those components to deliver the vision I've had for this module.

Thanks again for your interest, I hope this post will encourage you to remain optomistic (sp?) about the module and it's direction despite the lack of a release.