As Lee mentioned in another thread, Open WebStudio (OWS) does seem to be quite powerful.  It also seems to have a very steep learning curve.  You might describe it as a learning cliff!  I'm still working my way through this one.

I'm working on a couple of sites and we're tending to use these modules:

• Engage Publish
• Smart-Thinker UserProfile and UserGroups
• Mandeeps' LiveContent

Also I use :

• ZLDNN Module Wrapper (for special layouts)
• ZLDNN PopUpWindow
• Ventrian News Articles
• Ventrian Private Messages (integrates nicely with the Smart-Thinker modules AND with ActiveForums)
  

Another favorite modules is ActiveForums from ActiveModules

• today ActiveModules released two free versions of ActiveForums that have a full set of features, but seem to be limited in the number of forums that you can have. 
  
• ActiveModules has also pre-announced "ActiveSocial."  This seems to be a major new release of ActiveProfile, ActiveMessaging, ActiveForums and other things that I don't know about.  I expect to learn more about this at OpenForce in November.

Social networking with DotNetNuke:

• I have not used the Venexus modules, but it appears that we now have three sets of social networking modules.  This is quite a bit more than earlier in the year.
• I particularly like the new StoryFeed component in the Smart-Thinker modules.  It's got a nice API for integration with other modules, so you can log and display lots of user activities on your site.

Workflow:

• One of the features that drew me to Engage Publish is the "workflow."  Essentially you can have multiple versions of a module, and have an approval structure.  That's in addition to publishing groups of articles, with categorization, lists of articles by category, etc.
• Effority recently released it's "Workflow HTML" module as an open source project.  Think of this as the Text/HTML module with multiple versions and approval.  I'm finding this very useful, especially for websites where I want to permit workers to add and/or edit content, but want to have an "editor" responsible for choosing to make the new content live.  Having multiple versions also means that you can revert to an old version of content if that is needed.

My question to all of you is ... what modules are you using, for what, and why did you pick them?

Hi Joe,

Great post, I'm going to sticky this - everyone add your comments about various modules you use here and we can use it as a central feedback area.

Modules I use have varied over time and it always depends on the project, but some of the main ones I use are:

• Ventrian News Articles + Subscription Tools (I'm looking to change subscription tools at moment though for more functionality)
  (The subscription to Ventrian gives all sorts of modules so is worth looking at for Galleries etc.)
• Active Forums
  
• Orizonti News Feeds (much better than core News Reader module)
  
• Smoke Ranch Software Banners Module (XHTML compliant and advertisers can view their own stats)
• Bonosoft Multipage display (old module left over on DNN Creative and would prob look for something else nowadays)
• Smart-Thinker Refer a Friend
• With the latest reviews in Issue 38 I've also now got sites using both:
• Xepient Open-Search and
• Venexus Software Collection (I've got some ideas for new sites based just on this suite of modules)

On DotNetNuke Podcast I was using NukeSyndicate but the search engines could not index the content correctly, so I have recently switched this out for Ventrian News Articles and converted it into a Podcast module

I have not yet looked at OWS, so would be interested how you get on with your learning cliff!