Hi!
I have a system where multiple publishers are publishing to a node and the subscribers need to differentiate between items published from different publishers. I didn’t want to modify my payloads so I did a little adventuring with Openfire sources and got it to set the item publisher attribute to items. The functionality is configurable through a system boolean property “xmpp.pubsub.set-item-publisher” and it defaults to false.
I’m not entirely sure though if the patch is fully conformant to the PubSub spec so I would like some comments on that and also any other comments would be welcome. 
The spec does not include who published the item, and likely never will as general pubsub architecture typically keeps a disconnect between subscribers and publishers.
If you want to know who published an item, that should be included as part of the application data (the item), or you should use PEP.
Sorry, but I don’t see any reason to include this patch in Openfire.
I thought that http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html#publisher-publish-success-publisher meant that you could configure the service to include the publisher in the item?
My apologies, that is a newer addition to the spec that I wasn’t aware of.
This update would be included as part of a much larger task, which is to update the Openfire pubsub implementation to the most recent version of the spec. (OF-25)
This won’t get applied on its own, as it would basically create a hybrid implementation that has some features of the latest spec but the rest adhere to an earlier version.