Module development and code questions

I've been working on a simple way to add a configurable contacts directory to Drupal sites. The contacts_dir.module didn't come across as very configurable if the module is used to power multiple sites from a single document root.

My solution is to allow the user to define their own contact card form using Flexinode. My module then works around the flexinode you've created to provide an interface to browse your contacts.

The upside of this is each contact is a Drupal node, so (in theory) other Drupal modules which work with nodes should work nicely.

Hey all,

Wondering if anyone could give me any insight as to the best solution for this situation.

I'm just in the process of setting up my first Drupal site for my department's intranet at work and am writing a module to authenticate users via their Unix account details (local and NIS). I've got the basics in place - it's treated as a distributed authentication method which calls an external perl script which does the authentication checks then returns the result.

Hi,

can anyone tell me why the filemanager module stores the attached files (i am using filemanager.module + attachment.module) of a node in active/0/ || active/1/ || active/2 ???

Why three directories? When does the module stores the file in /0 /1 or /2? Is there any difference between files?

I'll hope someone can tell me.... otherwise i'll have to read many code.

Greetings,

Jott

I'm writing an authentication module. I know the functions that control this are in user.module, and I found the hook docs. But I can't find anything that documents what each field in the users table is/does. Are the database fields documented anywhere?

In particular, I'd like to know what "status" does/means and how it is set. It looks to me like it controls whether the user is allowed to log in, but I want to be sure. I can figure this out by spending lots of time starting at the code, but if someone here can verify, it would save me time and I'd appreciate it.

My forum uses a fork of SMF (heavily modified by myself) that implements paid subscriptions along with some other features I needed (post moderation, improved notifications, a couple other things). I discovered Drupal some time after coding all this, and I'm adding this to my site. There have been a few obstacles to overcome:

(1) There are serious name collisions between SMF and Drupal. Since my copy of SMF is so heavily modified I'd never do a standard upgrade again anyway, I just changed the variable names on the SMF side. That took an hour or two and it's working fine now.

(2) I managed to integrate the two interfaces by making a custom SMF theme that uses frames. My regular navigation bar from SMF is on the left, and Drupal is the page content on the right. I coded the SMF navigation links to target _parent so it breaks out of the frame if a non-Drupal link is clicked. I made this look virtually identical to the other pages on my site by making a custom Drupal theme using straight PHP. I needed the flexibility of straight PHP, and that's easier for me that learning an engine. I use the SMF header and suppress the Drupal header. I used Drupal's primary links to duplicate the buttons across the top of each page on my site. The only way you can tell the frame version from the non-frame version is that the navigation bar for the frame version has a scroll bar.

(3)...

I want to use Drupal to create something like Bloglines on my site - users have their own blogs (as Drupal already provides), and can choose whether to make these blogs public or private (which Drupal does NOT support). Ideally, I'd like users to be able to create their own personal "access lists" - people who can view their blogs.