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Hi,

Here is how I got custom links etc. As you guessed I used views to return the list of items belonging to a particular taxonomy term.

In the view that I setup I set the style as unformatted so that the entire node shows in the list (instead of the teaser). This may not be good for you as you probably only want to show the teaser view.

To show the custom link instead of the "more..." link I did the following.
1) I set up a new content type eg. listing_item. I also gave it a field called weburl where I could specify the external website URL for use in the custom link.
2) Instead of this content type being shown using the default node.tpl.php I made a copy called node-listing_item.tpl.php. This ensures that my custom content type (listing_item) uses it's own template (node-listing_item.tpl.php)
3) I then edited the node-listing_item.tpl.php adding this <a href="http://<?php print $node->field_weburl[0]['safe'] ?>" target="_blank">Go to <?php print check_plain($node->title) ?></a>
4) This link renders the weburl field set in the custom content type and copies the node title.

The easiest way for you achieve what you want may be to use the CONTEMPLATE module, with this you can easily set how your teaser and body renders. I think you can do what I did above but for rendering your teaser, but off the top of my head I'm not sure how.

If you do it the way I did then the Contemplate module can still be useful, as when you set up a content template you can choose what fields you would like to show. You just click what field and it gives you the appropriate PHP syntax. I then added this to my custom node.tpl.php file (node-listing_item.tpl.php).

This was a bit of a rambling explaination - if there is anything I can clarify let me know.

I achieved the 5 star rating system by ordering the list with views. I use views to firstly show all listings for a particular taxonomy (using a copy of the default taxonomy_term view), I then order the list based on the average 5 star rating.

Once you have managed to get the view listing the taxonomy content, to get it ordering the list by the 5 star rating go to the view setup and under 'Relationship' add 'Node: Voting results' (obviously you will need to have enabled the 5 star voting widget for this to work).

Set the 'Data Filters' to the following:
Value type: - Percent
Vote tag: - Vote
Aggregation function: - Average

Once you have done this you can then go to the 'Sort Criteria setup and add 'Voting API results as the sort criteria. The Relationship will be set to Voting Results and the Sort order to Descending (to sort from highest ranking avg. to lowest).

Hope this helps - if you need more info on any part of the above let me know.

I used a bunch of modules, but the main ones used to achieve the listings and voting/ranking functionality are:

5 Star
Voting API
ConTemplate (content templates)
Tokens
Views

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I set up the menu manually. I probably should have created the menu using the taxonomy menu module or something as it would have been easier. Basically it is my taxonomy in a menu representation.

The 'main' navigation categories, like Arts & Culture, are set so that they aren't expanded. When you click it the Arts & Culture sub-categories then appear. The Arts & Culture index page is just a static page of content. There are other ways I could have done this, but don't mind this solution as it's not going to change often (apart from the review features).

I suspect I haven't done something correctly though as the menu & breadcrumbs work don't work when clicking through a category. When you go to one of the sub categories like Photography the menu works ok, but the breadcrumb doesn't show the Arts & Culture link. Then when you click in to a site listing within Photography the menu collapses and the breadcrumb gets the Photography link but is still missing the main category Arts & Culture link. I have been trying to get around it using tokens and custom breadcrumbs, but not found a way yet.

When I first set the site up with Drupal 5 I wasn't very clued up so haven't done this the best way. At the time the only way I could get it working as I wanted was by showing the whole node in the view list output.

In retrospect the list view should ideally have shown just the node teasers, but as the descriptions are so short this option worked as I needed it to.