Module development and code questions

I have a site with a great deal of nodes that want to appear on the front page, so I wrote a natty little module which just displays the titles neatly ordered in columns, and grouped by user.

Since about the same time my hosting provider was complaining to me that I was using far too much disc space, I decided to optimise things by using straight SQL to recover the node information I wanted (thus avoiding multiple calls to node_api etc etc).

This works great, the front page now loads much faster than it did, except.... my URL aliases have of course disappeared.

I am having a problem sorting number fields created using Flexinode for Drupal 4.6. When I'm viewing the data in the Table or tabular view, numbers do not sort properly.

For example: Number Field 1 sorted ascending
1000
3
5

Is there a fix for this problem? Does Flexinode for 4.7 work better at sorting numbers?

Thanks.

Hi,

I am just about to start development on a series of modules (will be extending some of the current e-commerce modules) that I require for a new website I am developing and I have a few questions before I begin.

1. I will allow users of a specific Role to create a store, with a page of information about their store, and the products that they sell. These products will be grouped into categories and subcategories and I will need to create a block that only displays when a user is viewing the particular users store (Ideally there would be no mention of that user, just the page that they created with information about their business). Each store will have a different set of categories and sub categories.

What would be the best way to do this. Would it be to determine the Owner of the current node, and then display the Categories and Subcategories that are also owned by that user, or is there a different way of doing it.

2. Because the users will need to specify their own Categories and Subcategories (each store may have different names for each), is there a way for users to create a "Personal" taxonomy vocab with their own terms, which are not shown in any other users display? I think this would be too difficult because it would also mean that access needs to be given to the user to link that taxonomy with a particular node item etc.

3. I will be extending the product module to allow for sizes and attributes. Sizes will replace the current "Price" of the product, and the user will type in the size (Size Name) and the related price for that size. Attributes would be different, for example they would only add or subtract from the price of the item. For example a attribute group would be Color (which would be exclusive - only 1 color can be selected at a time) and the different attributes would be Red (+0.00), Green(+2.50) and Blue (+5.00).

I like to make the contact enable by default for all users, and i want to make a button to contact with the contact user in node post, every node posted by users can have a button with contact in links !

How can i do that ?

Thanks

Is there an existing module for integrating Drupal with
4image Image Gallery?
help...

Hello, I would like to allow any user to access:
/user/2/contact

ie. The administrator is the only users to use contact forms - the only exception is that anyone can contact the administrator. I have /user/2/contact aliased to /contact and made it accessible as a primary link.

I have tried to customise a couple of _access hooks with no luck. I don't quite understand how to approach this problem.

Thanks for anyone's input
Simon