Module development and code questions

Hey folks,
I had some ideas about Tagzania and Drupal.
Tagzania provides the possibility to tag locations. (which are then displayed on GoogleMaps)
Drupal has a sophisticated taxonomy system (which are also tags... somehow ;) )

It is not really difficult ot let these two work together, but I am still looking for examples where this could be useful.
One possibility is to provide a map link for posts, showing the location of which this post is talking about (if it's flagged with positioned tag)
So if someone is talking about this cool new café in New York he can directly provide a map showing its location,
Tagzania is working with the Google Map API, which works quite good.

Another cool feature would be to find related posts to a specific entry (related because it's nearby).

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How could it work?

We create a (simple) space taxonomy in drupal. As example (for me ;))

global 
-  germany 
--  muenster
---- university 
---- home
-- berlin
-- cologne
- US

...


 
 and so on

Every term in this taxonomy refers to a location, which is also a valid tag at Tagzania (and therefore linked to a position). Every entry is flagged with one or more category tags and one location tag.

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Do you have some other ideas which I can

Anyone know how or if the subscription module can be set so that an email is sent if content is posted, but not published? I want an administrator to be notified of new content so that they can review and manually publish.

Has anyone done this or know how?

I'm just gonna keep doing this 'til somebody tells me to just shut up :)

When I'm in a forum, and I use the search, I've grown accustomed to the idea that my search can somehow be focused.

On Drupal.org, a search is a search of the entire site. It's not hard to see how that would quickly become frustrating.

Is there a workaround for this - and if so, why is it not implemented on this site?

And I hope I don't sound like I'm being negative - I'm a Drupal newbie. But some of this stuff is just SO aggravating :)

Is there any way to open the current module listings here on Drupal.org to commentary/review?

I think there would be a great deal of support for that, as I would most definitely rate my experience with each?

Currently each newbie user is presented with a list of modules available for download. As a newbie, I thought that each had passed some "litmus test" for inclusion, basically received the Drupal "seal of approval" - when in reality, as I've been told, it's simply a listing of available modules, some more stable than others.

I like interwiki ... but I haven't used it for the interwiki-tags which come bundled, but instead for two things: 1) linking to amazon affiliate links, 2) technorati tags.

I described the technorati work here: http://drupal.org/node/20652#comment-47586

I'm new to Drupal as a development environment, so go easy on me.

I'm a bit confused after reading the relevant documentation (it seems incomplete). So I thought I'd ask here. The goal is as follows:

I want to display a gallery style page that features arbitrary content. The user might see a page of rows and columns, each cell may contain a thumbnail image, some summary text, a link to a .doc file or any other type of file that has been uploaded through drupal.

The presentation would look something like this, but there would be additional text and some links to other areas of the site.

All the data required to populate these cells will be pulled from the drupal DB.

My question is what is the "proper", Drupal way to create a totally customized page? The page would retain the header and nav elements of the rest of the Drupal site, but the content area would be totally customized.

I initially thought I'd need to write a module, but it seems those are intended for customizing Drupal functionality not the site content.

I thought maybe I was supposed to create a new "page", but I'm still not clear what a Drupal page actually is (it seems like just another story or blog entry).

I thought maybe I was supposed to create an external .php file, but I'm not sure Drupal knows how to incorporate externally created pages.