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The news module used on this site is news 1.2.1 which is considered the latest stable release. It's available on the
dev.xoops.org site.
It is not cloneable by default, there are many changes you have to make to acheive that, but it is doable.
Steps to take for each copy of news.
1.Change the name of the news folder, give it a unique name (lower case letters). i.e. example_news
2.Open xoops_version.php, change modversion['dirname'] = "example news";
3.In xoops_version.php, change the name of the sql tables to make them unique modversion['tables'][0]="example_stories"
4.Change the table names in sql/mysql.sql to the name you chose in xoops_version.php
5.Find all references to the tables in the news php files and change them to your new table names. Normally that looks something like xoopsDB->prefix("topics") or db->prefix("stories") etc.
6.Find all hard-coded url's using modules/news/ and change them to your new directory name... modules/example_news
There's 69 changes that need to be made for points 5 and 6 that I've found.
I also needed several versions of the news module. It's easier for the next copies because you can just search on your new name (e.g. example_) and change that.
Good luck!
Rowd