Module development and code questions

I'm currently working on a few projects that involve Drupal and Multi-Media.
In this post I want to review the various ways I see of doing this within Drupal and I want to get some advice/opinions from others.

Basically a Podcast is just an RSS feed and in theory any drupal module with an uploaded attachment should operate as an podcastable RSS feed, right ?

So the first option would be to simply create either fleixnodes or story modules and have uploaded attachments and then categorize them based upon their content type. And to utilize upload to attach the files to each node.

This option has its potential simplicity as a benefit but it would lack some of the features of the audio module and video module. The other main drawback is that it would require users to painstakingly upload their content via an http interface which is a recipe for timeout and wasted effort. If anyone knows a way to link remote files currently in drupal that would be nice. Also a customization/opening of the code from ourmedia.org so that other drupal sites could upload their content to archive.org would be helpful.

The next option is to utilize the audio module. This is pretty much the same as the previous in terms of it currently lacks support for remotely linking files. It adds the features of a flash mp3 player and getid3 support to read tracks.

Ber Kessels had proposed a new way to deal with files that seemed very interesting but is currently waiting development that would allow linking of files to nodes and also allow files to be remote/local.

Sorry guys if this is inappropriate here. But this is a little way we give back to the community here :) for newbies, you can make the Search block more attractive and directive

We believe the default Search.module could have the `Popular Search' tied to search log, and can also be added manually by admin whatever he/she wishes site visitors to search.

Being PHP-illiterate, the way we did it is just a manual way of copying the resulting HTML code of Search block, and adding that and links inside a custom block.

So the code:

Popular words & phrases
• < a href="http://*/search/node/item">item
• < a href="http://*/search/node/stuff">stuff
• canoe and kayak
• lakes, rivers, oceans

Statistics - Internet access

Hi! Is there any better documentation for the views module than http://drupal.org/node/42609 ? I'm dreadfully confused.

I am using Drupal: 4.4.1 on Linux2.4.20 . I customized the notify module.

Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction. In essence, I ran fbu through form updater, which zeroed in on hook_settings, and got that bit loading under last night's CVS. What's got me flummoxed is this section:

	if (variable_get('fbu_files_backup_interval', 0)) {
		if (!file_check_directory($backup_path)) {
			form_set_error('fbu_auto_backup_path', t('The automatic backup path does not exist, or is not writeable.  Automatic backups will not begin until you fix this error.'));
               // else if and so on...

The module calls for the directory to be absolute, and I've tried every combination I can think of (its running in a win32 apache sandbox, so obvious choices were http://localhost/sandbox/files/fbu, G:\apache\htdocs\sandbox\files\fbu, etc.). Since form_set_error is preventing the values in the variable table from being set, I've manually deleted them before attempting to set a new path, but without any better result. My apache and PHP error logs aren't offering any useful diagnostic info, nor is watchdog; I'm pretty sure its not the forms api, because the rest of the form runs smoothly.

If it helps, these are the entries from the variable table:
fbu_email s:24:"maxbell@hostingthing.com";
fbu_files_backup_interval s:5:"86400";
fbu_auto_backup_path s:34:"http://localhost/sandbox/files/fbu";
fbu_archive_type s:3:"zip";
fbu_max_email s:1:"5";

I switched of the "Display descendants" but still get it.

Sample:

- Portrait
- Products
- Pro1
- Pro2
- News

Adding a node to pro1 and pro2
clicking on products will display the teaser of pro1 and pro2 nodes

whats wrong?