Module development and code questions

I am using Alex Reisner's excellent formproc module, but cannot get the "formproc_charcount" feature to work. A working example of it can be found at his page at:
http://www.alexreisner.com/drupal/modules/formproc

I own a site license for a really nice quiz script called igivetest http://www.igivetest.com/

What is the accepted method of collecting a list of values from a textarea in hook_settings and recording the list of values as a serialised array in the variables table? Or is it better to just save them as an unserialised string, as block.module does, for example?

Insert a footer in tablesort_sql is it possible?
(I want an ordered table with a sum of a column in footer.)

bye
Gianni

How I can, changing this code:

Hello,
I wanted to uprgrade existing 4.6 ecommerce module to the new forms API in 4.7.
I have used formupdater.module and documentation, but not all aspect of using new API is clear to me.

Please tell me how to put custom output to the $form array i.e in the store_settings function

all I want to return is the $form array as the documentation suggest but there is still need to add additional output like:

t('<h3>Store module dependencies</h3>');

and