Module development and code questions

hello everybody,

I don't understand how to create a module?

If somebody can help me, would be really sympathetic.

I'm interested in placing a word limit in a node entry ... perhaps by utilizing flexinode. Essentially, I want users to write an entry that can be no longer than 750 words (or perhaps 4,000 characters.)

Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this work?

Many thanks,

Matt

It's become painful obvious that one of the areas that Drupal needs some work is in it's gallery/photo module. I've gotten a little frustrated an almost abandoned Drupal's module in favor of going to a packaged program. However, that defeats one of the best things about Drupal - tight code integration.

Have problems with the taxonomy_menu.module

Tried to implement the taxonomy menu module on the latest version of drupal. Generates a nice menu in the bloks but geneates an error when clicking on one of the theme's

error message: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: db_escape_string() in /home/xxxxx/public_html/blog/modules/taxonomy_menu.module on line 78

I am looking to do the following:

-Users register and a directory under /files is created for them (or somthing similar)
-Users can attach files to blog posts as they normally would which are saved in their folder
-Users would have a limit on storage, say 250MB.
-User would be able to see their files and delete old ones etc as needed

Does this already excist?

I see not an iota of progress has been made with Drupal's news aggregator since my departure.

This module has no real utility at all. It's half-baked. It doesn't harness one tenth of the utility it could.

I shouldn't have to mod the code to do something as simple as spedifying the amount of characters I want in my feed.

I shouldn't have to spend half the day searching your site to find out there's no documentation noting the fact that Drupal doesn't do this out of the box.

It's like lending me your car without giving me the keys.