Kristof's right, the doc's are sparse - but they are getting better. There is a good, albeit hard to find, set of docs on extensions though. The PubSub one is at http://www.igniterealtime.org/fisheye/browse/~raw,r=11613/svn-org/smack/trunk/documentation/extensions/pubsub.html.
After going the from scratch custom IQ Provider route with an extension I found it was easier to do it using the managers as much as possible. The developers that wrote the managers have abstracted away a lot of the pain points.
Example (modified-for-geoloc version of one rcollier wrote on the Smack forum):
ConfigureForm form = new ConfigureForm(FormType.submit);
form.setPersistentItems(false);
form.setDeliverPayloads(true);
form.setAccessModel(AccessModel.open);
PubSubManager manager
= new PubSubManager(connection, "pubsub.communitivity.com");
Node myNode = manager.createNode("http://jabber.org/protocol/geoloc", form);
StringBuilder body = new StringBuilder(); //ws for readability
body.append("<geoloc xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/geoloc' xml:lang='en'>");
body.append(" <country>Italy</country>");
body.append(" <lat>45.44</lat>");
body.append(" <locality>Venice</locality>");
body.append(" <lon>12.33</lon>");
body.append(" <accuracy>20</accuracy>");
body.append("</geoloc>");
SimplePayload payload = new SimplePayload(
"geoloc",
"http://jabber.org/protocol/geoloc",
body.toString());
String itemId = "zz234";
Item<SimplePayload> item = new Item<SimplePayload>(itemId, payload);
// Required to recieve the events being published
myNode.addItemEventListener(myEventHandler);
// Publish item
myNode.publish(item);
Or at least that's the hard way :). Just remembered there's a PEPManager now...
PEPProvider pepProvider = new PEPProvider();
pepProvider.registerPEPParserExtension(
"http://jabber.org/protocol/tune", new TuneProvider());
ProviderManager.getInstance().addExtensionProvider(
"event",
"http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub#event", pepProvider);
Tune tune = new Tune("jeff", "1", "CD", "My Title", "My Track");
pepManager.publish(tune);
You'd need to write the GeoLocProvider and GeoLoc classes.