Module development and code questions

If I want to add an extra text field on the node creation form, what's the best way to do that? Also, is there a standard function I should use to strip illegal characters from the input?

I'm working in the 4.7 beta. I want to have the menus under i.e. Contact to be hidden, so it is only possible to see Contact, but not "contact international, contact local and so forth"

But I can't seem to get it to work....

I have tried to create a page with a top menu, and a static frontpage. After clikcing on one of the topmenus, a block on the left side should appear only for that page, a a front page for that page should also be viewable.

After i install a drupal i install css modlue. I make table of course. And in form shows a textarea on CSS. until now is ok but when i submit a form the css don't work. So i looked on site source and saw that where site trys to load css/get/2 ( @import "css/get/2"; ) but nighter file on such name are exist. What can be wrong in my configuration of this modlue?

I am writing support for g2image (similar to img_assist but for Gallery2) into a module (the details of g2image itself are not that important -- except that it's not my code). It needs to be passed a couple of parameters including the id of the form and the id of the textarea (I can get this).

How can I get the id of the form that the textarea is in?

I could use hook_elements with 'form' I suppose to find the form id, but then how can I associate it with the correct textarea?

Thanks for your help.

Hi all,
I have been using the nodewords meta tag generator for sometime now, and it works pretty well except that the frontpage does not seem to get a description. Checking out the readme (that comes with the module), it says I need a mission statement and a slogan. So I have added both both nothing is produced.

For now I have the theme page file to get a descripton ... but would really like to get the automated functionality working. I have checked that I am not just being dum, and have it enabled.

Am I missing something or is there an issue with the module ?

I'm confused. The documentation of API funtion db_next_id() (http://drupaldocs.org/api/head/function/db_next_id) states:

For compatibility reasons, Drupal does not use auto-numbered fields in its database tables. Instead, this function is used to return a new unique ID of the type requested. If necessary, a new sequence with the given name will be created.