Module development and code questions

Hi!

I'm new to drupal, and I'm having BIG troubles the the forum... That's because I NEED to limit acces to some forum categories and there is NO way I can do it... I've tried taxonomy access... Nothing...

Anyone cané help out a newbie?...

I've researched drupal.org and no help yet..

Any help would be appreciated! :)

I reaaly loved the look and feel of drupal, but if there is no way of getting this right... I guess I will have to go with Xoops...

And... really... that one way I wouldn't like to go...

Completely new to Drupal and module development. I am trying to make a modification to the "Amazon Tools" module to allow me to choose which items go in the recommended list. I have added a new column to the database and I can load it into a new $node->Recommended variable. I added a new checkbox called "Recommended" to the amazon-node editing form and properly set its initial state from $node->Recommended. Now...for the life of me I can't figure out how to retrieve the value of my new checkbox from the form and store it back to the database.

Hi,

I'm running drupal 4.6.2 and my drupal site heavily relies on the book module, however it doesn't seem to display the author name or date on the book nodes as it did when I ran 4.5. Is this a bug or just a downgraded feature of the module for 4.6? Or have I done something wrong and switched that setting off somewhere?

Open to all advice.

Thanks alot.

F.Q.

I want to create a link so that i can list "online users" in a page like users list (http://drupal.org/profile)

how can i do this?

the following line:

<smile type="text/css" media="all">@import "misc/drupal.css";<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://varnelis.net/blogapi/rsd">

which appears to be created by blogapi makes my site fail xhtml validation. what can I (or drupal developers) do about it?

obviously, in the line of code above, smile is really style, but the forum won't let me input style, even with the code tags around it!

I've been having a tiny bit of a problem with modules on Drupal :)
It seems that quite a few of them have the ability to muck up the core.
So I was wondering if anyone had any information on which modules were viewed as being stable? Or at least ones that, if unstable, won't crash the core?
The rather steep learning curve I'm facing with Drupal had been kinda steepened by having various modules backfire on me :)