Module development and code questions

So, I am in the process of developing a module. There is a component that I am still not sure on the design of. Basically, I am looking at wanting to embed an image on the page as part of the module. The question I have is, what is the best approach to exposing this? I should add the idea is that the image is coming from an external server. The URL for the image is defined as part of the module.

For several sites, on a group of servers, I would like
to publish / exchange some dinamic content.

I am thinking about blocks, or RSS-Feeds, ... or
may be creating static info-files based on block content.

Any suggestion or help is welcome.

Best regards

Roland
Centroamerica:TV

P.S. In preview, this forum has a date of - January 1, 1970 - 00:00

I have a custom node type/module called "summaries" that I'd like to exclude from all search results. I see ways to get my module included in the search api docs, but how do I exclude a specific node->type?

Search http://www.realself.com for Microdermabrasion and the 9th result down you'll see "summaries" - this is only supposed to be visible to editors/admins. The access permissions are setup correctly.

So, what I'm looking to do is create a monthly newsletter that shows recent posts ** that the user has access to (in OG) **, as well as reminds each user of their profile status and other 'user-dependent' information. I looked at the simplenews module, but I don't think that'll do it.

The question is, is there something special I need to do, once I'm inside a loop (going through each user), to have PHP parse all the node teasers and other dynamic data into an HTML string I can email off? Do I need to somehow force PHP to parse\render the content string?

Here's my use case: Some users can control the look, feel and navigation on their part of the site, and need to be able to edit their navbar menu (or two, one at the top and one at the bottom).

In other words I would like to give some users permission to manage their own menus, one or two per user. Has anyone thought about or implemented anything like this?

It would be possible to store the links elsewhere in the database (e.g. as variables, etc.) but it seems like using the menu system would be ideal.

I've begun work on a similar module to Contact Directory for my work. The goals are pretty much the same as Contact Directory, except we want the module to be as user-friendly as possible, allow new fields types to be created/deleted easily, and have a summary page for each entry. We looked at the contact_dir module and decided it wasn't user friendly enough (the people who will be managing the directory can barely manage html).