Module development and code questions

I'm thinking about one function. Mayby you can help me somebody ...
I'd like set up ONE default (main) picture for EACH node (story). Imagine: on front page are 10 stories and on left side of each title and teaser is picture. So ... picture is not putted into the body texty, but automatically placed by engine near of story (teaser).

For each story I have to set-up WHAT picture will be used of course.

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 ?