Module development and code questions

I'm not really sure where to post this so I've put it here; if this is not the proper place for a request like this then I apologize.

I currently am using code I found and slightly modified in a node history block. The block shows the last modified node, who it is by, and at what time they modified it. I've included the code with my alterations at the bottom of this post.

This code works great for a block as the formatting is perfectly suitable. What I am looking to do with it, though, is make a page out of it that's dedicated to showing the history of a specific type of node (in my case, book). The formatting is not very suitable for this purpose. See the formatting examples below.

Is there some type of friends module already available for adding and managing other users from the site as friends... pretty much like how myspace does it.

Does anybody know if something like this already exists?

Thanks!

I need some hints on how to attack this problem.

Over the next couple of months or so, I'm working on a project to convert over Kairos, an online journal, to Drupal. Kairos publishes webtexts, and these can be of any form--HTML, Flash--and the authors can use Javascript and CSS however they want to. So to make things easy, we plan to pull in the webtexts into Drupal using iframes so that Drupal can provide author, date, metadata, and breadcrumbs for the site. But we want the iframe to fill the rest of the page. Here's an example text of how Kairos is currently doing it using javascript and frames. We might go for a vertical element with Drupal.

I've begun experimenting with iframes with Drupal as a wrapper by just pasting the iframe HTML code into the node body. The problem I'm hitting is getting the entire document to display. IE gets close. Firefox ignores the 100% height attribute completely. I know how to remove the scroll bars, but that doesn't alleviate the problem. I don't know anything about javascript but I know that's probably the solution. Can someone point me in the right direction? A tutorial that will accomplish this? My ultimate goal is to create a module which accepts the url to be iframed and loads the javascript into Drupal as necessary.

Has anyone considered a module, or written one of their own, that will, similar to the way Firefox does for extensions, check for updates to modules (either at a predefined interval or upon admin activation)?

It really is a pain, particularly when using many modules, to conduct periodic manual searches for updates to modules, followed by manually download and installation of those updates.

I can't be the only person who would love to see this functionality.

hi,

do i have to install the whole gallery2 or just add the gallery.module file to the module files? because i keep getting the error: "Unable to initialize embedded Gallery"

i dont know what im doing wrong

Is it possible to create a node of CCK components and then serialize it in some method for distribution?

I'm working on a module to provide data from CiviCRM. Many of the things I need in my module will be needed by other modules (e.g. selecting a CiviCRM group, user or profile). If I can write these up as CCK fields, others can take better advantage of my work.

I'd also like to create some default uses of these fields - pre compiled CCK content types.

Can I serialize them like I can with a view and implant them in static module code?

Thanks
-M