Module development and code questions

Not sure if this belongs here, or in the "Core Development" forum, as it might involve some changes to core as well.

But we need some advanced group funvtionality added to drupal.
Here is a sketch of what we have in mind:

• We need thousands of users (ok, at least more than 1000, but probably not more than 100 000 at the moment..)
• These should be organized in one or more of a few hundered groups.
• Some users are only memeber of a single group.
• Some users are members of several groups.
• The groups are somewhat hierarchical. IE. we might have
  • Organization A
    • Department X
    • Department Y
      • Workgroup 1
      • Workgroup 2
    • Department Z
      • Workgroup I
  • Organization B
  • List C
  • (...)
• Some of the groups should be "self managed". IE, they should work more or less like the "og" module today. Some should be managed from a parent, some should only be managed by the administrator, some should allow other users to apply for memeberships, and some would require an invitation.
  Example:
  • Manager of Org. A is allowed to add users to any of its department groups, but is not allowed to add new departments.
  • Dept. Y is allowed to add new workgroups.
  • Workgroup 2 is allowed to accept or decline new users who apply for this group
  • Org. B can add as many departments or workgroups as it wants
    

Greetings all,

I've been working on an address module and address API over the last few weeks here at CivicSpace Labs (http://www.civicspacelabs.org). It is now a Drupal project at http://drupal.org/node/18723.

Does anyone know if there are plans to include <category> elements in RSS (if we ever move up to RSS 2) and Atom feeds? Technorati has begun doing some interesting things with indexing category elements in RSS and Atom feeds that include them. It would be nice if we could start to get Drupal entries indexed as tags. I will put in a feature request for the Atom feed because that seems the easiest to update, but wondering if people have been thinking along these lines.

I really dig the dropshadow effect that's featured on ALA. I changed a single line of code in matteo's inline module and updated my css with the info from ALA. If anyone is interested I can forward my code as a feature request to matteo to be included in the next version. Here's what the effect looks like on my homepage:

http://www.nautis.com

- matthew | nautis.com

When Drupal 4.6 is released I'll be pretty much abandoning the Amazon search module for a significantly enhanced Amazon associate tools module. You will be happy to know it works with every existing Amazon store.

I'm writing a module that will move calendar events from another on-line calendar application into the Drupal Event module. Now that I've figured out how to create nodes from inside of a program, it's going fairly well. But I've run into a very annoying problem caused by the way that Drupal handles user time zones and time stamps. While I will be able to hack around it, this really ought to be fixed in the framework itself, since from reading the forums, it's clearly causing problems for users.

Here's a quick description of the problem. The Event module stores the start time as a Unix time number, which represents the number of seconds that have passed since January 1, 1970 GMT. The GMT (actually, UTC to be exact) is an important piece of this: if two computers running Unix are in different time zones, but are syncing to an external clock, they should be have the same number for the current time. The servers, though, have a notion of their own time zone, and use libraries to convert from the UTC time number into the current local time when they format a date for an application.

So how does Drupal (circa 4.5) deal with this?