Module development and code questions

Please, help me! I've read already diff. forum notes, nothing helps;((

1. I've got a PHP theme, downloaded banner module for Drupal 4.6, installed everything as it was said
2. I loaded the picture and can see it in the admin/banner/3/view, and in the banners (My banners)
3. I've created a block and added the following code inside: echo banner_display(); I tried the same varient with 'return' and 'print',
4. I can see the title of this block.

BUT I still can't see the banner ;((
It seems to me I've tried everything

I'm fashioning a database migration program, from Mambo to Drupal. I figure it will take just about as long to write as transferring the data manually, but I'll gain more experience writing SQL.

In Mambo the mySQL date/time format is stored in the mos_users table, registerDate and lastvisitDate fields as type datetime with a format of 0000-00-00 00:00:00.

Anyone know what PHP function and parameters I would apply to this time format data to get the Drupal database integer?

CL Elliott

By default, the first post in a thread is displayed on every page. In a flat forum, this seems to confuse people. Here's a way to turn it off.

In node-forum.tpl.php, add this to the top of the file:

<?php
	if (!isset($comment) and $_REQUEST['from'] != 0) {
		return;
	}
?>

Anyone know if there's an easier/better way to do this?

[I posted this yesterday as a reply to another topic in "How do I..." but it's fallen pretty far down the list, and this is probably a better place to ask my question anyhow.]

I've been trying to get paypal_subscriptions working on my local test site, and it seems to be working now, but only after several hours of debugging and fixing stuff... and I'm still left with one issue I don't understand at all.

A bit of background:
I originally started using the ecommerce module and had hacked the ps module to work with it. I only did limited testing, but it seemed to be working. Unfortunately, the ecomm module wasn't cutting it - it was too complicated for what I need (and not flexible enough), the user experience was painful, and I found I was just working around it too much.

So, I ditched ecomm and chose to use paypal_framework (plus a few functions from the ecomm paypal) with the ps module and some custom code to handle my needs. I have a couple of extra modules that use the paypal_transaction hook for some of my custom processing.

The problem:
The paypal_transaction hook is called in ps upon receiving an IPN, but no matching data is found. When the same query is run in MySQL, data shows up. After some investigation, I determined that there's some sort of timing/sequence issue. Running the query in one of my other modules (called after ps), returns data. Yet even if I put a usleep() in ps, even if I loop it 100 times, that query still fails. It only works if ps is the last module called with paypal_transaction.

Intro

I'm relatively new to Drupal, so may be these ideas were discussed previously, if so please post a link here. I've got these ideas while reading Drupal docs, module development guide and handbooks on other application servers with component architecture.
While developing complicated modules with many components one can meet a problem of controlling interaction between them, especially with modules developed by other people. Here developers have to know deeply how to invoke foreign module's methods, which functions, parameters and responses they have to use. But in this case if modules "know" to much about each other they become very tied to each other. And developer have to pay much attention to this compatibility and not to break in in further versions. So much awareness leads to loosing flexibility from modular structure.

Interfaces are not panacea

I think direct calling function from foreign modules are evil for the further development process. Module functions should not be called directly except several interface methods which have fixed well-documented parameters and responce. Other methods should be private.
Like Drupal core invokes hooks from different modules. And these hook methods could be said as interface methods of the module for interoperaton with core. That's a great idea, but I think it is less suitable for working between modules. Because inter-modules operations are much more different and interfaces are to be more flexible to support calls which tends to be more complacted. How to keep compatibility in this case? Is it vicious circle?

I wonder if anybody can offer pointers about how to move all the links for a node into a block? So, each node's full page view displays a block taking you to the links for that node.

Thanks!