Module development and code questions

Hi all,

Wondering if anyone has done any work before to customise the information stored about different types of users, so different input fields are available e.g. for a 'professional' user a drop down box with professional type (doctor, lawyer, etc.).

Am still familiarising myself with drupal's innards and have considered a number of possible ways to accomplish what I want.

Initially I thought of creating a different flexinode for each user type and allowing access to creation of each based on user type. I decided though that it was silly to create a separate portal for entering user data when this already exists (and would it be possible to integrate already existing data into a flexinode anyway? i.e. to enable editing of data existing elsewhere already such as email address) and moved onto customising the user edit facilities. I considered just using the profile module but this doesn't seem to have any notion of user types so if I add a category of information such as professional I have no way of only showing this when the user is a professional and something entirely or partially different when the user is an advertiser for example.

So, as I see it, a number of options. Take the profile module and have a play around to see if I can come up with what I'm after. Or, create a module to do what I want. I started work on a Professional module and then realised I'm going to have to duplicate for each type of user required. Maybe I should create a generic module to do all this and a CustomUser settings interface (looking similar to permissions control maybe) to specify what fields to make available for each user type.

Most of you are probably familiar with the rating system employed by Netflix and others. Here's an implementation by ITConversations: http://www.itconversations.com/browse.php

Both Netflix and ITC are using something apparently called "StarBar", various pieces and versions of which can be seen here:

Hi Drupal Gurus:

I was hoping that somoene might be able to help me w/ a little problem. I have been flirting w/ the idea of creating my own nested tree structure as part of a module I'm developing. The structure would essentially complete with the taxonomy functionality except be localized to a $user->uid w/ the ability to be shared and or public.

How can I let users create their own secure (not site wide) taxonomy / tagging system for content?

I was hoping that this could be accomplished w/out the need for duplicating development.

Ok, I'm a total newbie at drupal development, but I know some php and am a capable programmer in my own right. Perhaps some of you can help me.

I would like to create a module that would have the following features:

I've created module which provides a wizard to assign a geographic location to your website and register it to geoURL.net.
It does also enable a block with a list of selected nearby websites around your page...

The wizard is implemented with the help of ajax, and might be a nice example if you like to implement something like that for yourself.

Ok, hopefully this is quick and I just missed something. I am building a click-edit Google map, and everything is alive and functions except for 1 element -- saving marker data. The difficulty (as I see it) is a choice between two ways of moving marker data.

Layout:
Map table -- has/stores map specific settings, center, zoom, etc
Marker table -- has/stores marker data and is keyed to a map entry based on $mapid
The ability to reuse markers without having to re-enter them is an unexpected benefit of this design.

Methods:
1. XMLRPC all the way. I click a point to create a marker, I edit that marker inline in the javascript, and I can save it directly vi XMLRPC. Piece of cake. Not much code, not much effort. The problem is going to be one of access. I can write XMLRPC code to dump all markers, or even in a worst case scenario, the problem of map or location based spam becomes a nightmare. The only token that I am aware I have access to would be document.cookies.PHPSESSID, but I don't know how that relates back to anything in Drupal that would let me authenticate and verify a content creator. The second problem with an XMLRPC only method is the fact that any new markers will/can get updated in a marker table before the map node has a nid assigned (or even exists for that matter)! The work around for that would be a staging table where orphans get deleted after a specified age limit, everything is keyed on PHPSESSID, and markers that belong to a map node that actually gets created get migrated to the live marker table when the submit occurs. Gut feeling tells me this is the method I should be trying to use, but I really don't have much of a starting point as far as Drupal and user verification are concerned.