Module development and code questions

I've been working on an idea.

Mission

To move my development modules into 4.7, without losing compatability with my establised 4.6 client installations.
We will not be commiting to 4.7 for a while (if ever) but the features I'm developing deserve to be forward-looking.

Problem

To even get the old modules to work in 4.7 requires a significant rewrite.
Doing so would branch the code, then make added features (developed under 4.7) harder to apply in parallal to the target 4.6 implimentations

Experimental solution - a hybrid 4.6/4.7

I'm converting my modules to 4.7 but adding the bits of the forms API that I need as a conditional library that will bring the 4.6 site up-to-date enough to be able to handle it.

I've got a bit of development happening to ease the migration from Forms 4.6 to 4.7 - I'm back-porting (part of) the 4.7 forms API to a plug-in for 4.6 so that I can move on with converting my modules to 4.7 without divorcing them entirely from my target 4.6 audience.

Most of it is looking pretty straight-forward, but I can't find a global or variable that explicitly tells me what version is running. I started by checking for the existance of 4.7-only functions, but now my back-port is emulating them, they exist once more.

Is there some sort of User Bio module or something so that users could look at each other's information? (screen name, etc.)

Jay

I didn't get any response in a previous post (http://drupal.org/node/50187) and still have the problem so hopefully someone can help....

I've created my own module based on dashboard and it seems to work when it's in the dashboard folder, however move it to it's own folder or the base module foldre and it shows up in list of modules to enable, but not on the create content page or the "access control" page. Now someone thought it might be linked to absolute paths or the like but as far as I can tell, no.

A great problem to have is that there are simply too many modules to keep track of in Drupal. Many other CMS systems allow users to update modules from within their sites admin interface. From a UI perspective it is obviously better to give admins the ability to install new modules and upate old ones from their admin interface, but this is probably not coming any time soon and would require extensive work.

Hi,

Iam trying to write a new module which basically searches the user profiles and displays the user names. The users have filled in some values and i want users to be able to search among themselves saying what content has each give.

for this i thought I should write a new search module. The search module (which should be in a block) should be able to search the data and display the users with the data on the search results page. I dont know how to link between the form in the block to the page results. Can someone give me some ideas how to go about?