The glMenu plugin has been available for several years as a premium plugin from portalparts.com but as of now is an un-restricted public download. This plugin has been used on 100's of sites over the past few years and is now even better. This plugin lets you take control of your site header and block menu.

You can create multi-level menu's online and setup the color scheme or style all using the online menu editor. Multiple menu styles are available and version 3.0 has been re-engineered to have an extendable OO class so developers can add new menu styles. Easily now pick and choose the menu style and use the online color picker to theme your site menus. The online menu options are very flexible and you can define menu labels for multiple languages so they switch for the user based on their language preference.

Currently there are three menu styles available but within each style are multiple menu options and colors. Just about any menu style and color combination is supported:

• Milonic Menu - one of the most popular javascript menus - www.milonic.com
• Pure CSS Menu
• ProCSS - like used for the site's header menu on portalparts.com is a CSS style menu with an image based design

Review the wiki docs for more information including the installation and user documentation.

You can download the file and please post your feedback in the forum on portalparts.com

So while we're busy wrapping up the development of Geeklog 1.5.0, the coding period for this year's Summer of Code has already started.

The Summer of Code timeline was set up with the schedules of universities in the US in mind. However, since several of our students are from other countries, some are still in the process of wrapping up their semester.

So we're off to a slow start for now, but things will soon be picking up speed. In the meantime, Bill is asking for your input on his project, Social Networking for Geeklog 2. Or you can read up (and join in) on the discussion about comment permissions for Jared's project to improve the comment handling in Geeklog 1.x.

And if you're interested in what other organizations are doing: This year's series of GSoC podcasts started off with Leslie Hawthorn (Geek Herder Extraordinaire at Google) interviewing some Pythonistas.

The second release candidate for Geeklog 1.5.0 is now available for download. We expect this to be the last release candidate before the final release, so if you haven't had a chance, now would be a good time to try out the new features in 1.5.0 and help us track down any remaining bugs.

The changes over rc1: The bundled plugins will no longer read the old config.php files, setting the site's default language and theme in the Configuration now works, and inconsistencies in the layout of the admin screens have been fixed. There were also quite a few changes for internationalisation, which also required a few more theme changes.