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To have specific news for different audiences, then you simply do what I described above...
Make different groups for each audience.
Make different news categories for each audience.
Assign view permissions for each category to only the group that should be able to view that news.
Then when someone in group 1 logs in, they see only category 1 news. When someone in group 2 logs in, they see only category 2 news.
Installing multiple copies of the same module is not possible in XOOPS. Instead, you have to do lots of permission configuration to support different "instances" of the same service.
You can "clone" a XOOPS module, by meticulously going through the source code and changing all references to the name of the module, and the folder and all other unique identifying characteristics, so that the module would then behave independently of any other modules of the same kind. But that's generally very complicated hacking work. (Though there are some facilities now for cloning WF-Channel, do a search for that in these forums if you're interested).
Depending on your needs, you could get into having a lot of groups to manage, if you want to have many different audiences in your site. XOOPS has poor support for managing a large number of groups (ie: more than 10 to 15). We manage a site with nearly 100. It's exceedingly error prone to manage changes to the group permissions through the System Admin->Groups interface, since you have to go one group at a time, and the UI doesn't indicate to you which group was the last one you changed. And the standard group permission form that most module use becomes extremely long and hard to use once you get a lot of groups in a site. But it is possible to do this, the core XOOPS technology supports it quite well, even if the UI is lacking.
XOOPS also has no facility to pushing administrative tasks "down the food chain" to senior users within an audience (for instance, if you have a group called "East Region Managers" you cannot give them the ability to Edit Users only within the East region. Once you turn on Edit Users, it's site wide, so they can modify and delete accounts in the East, West, North and South regions. Nothing you can do about that. So if you manage a site with tons of groups, you will have to manage all that complexity yourself; you can't delegate most of the admin tasks.
There are some special customizations we've done to support some of these situations, perhaps they will make it into XOOPS 2.4 or 2.0.14 if there is ever one? For the time being we're focused on other stuff.
Anyway, that's a tangent. It's quite simple to set up different audiences for content in a XOOPS site, as described at the top of this message. That's one of XOOPS' most fundamental strengths in my opinion. It just takes a bit of time and effort in the configuration.
--Julian
