Module development and code questions

I'm taking a stab at writing a flexinode field and was wondering if there was any API documentation that I'm missing. I looked around and didn't find any. I searched through the flexinode.module code and found what I think appears to be a comprehensive list of all hooks that are called:

By default, when you access a taxonomy term, Drupal lists all of the nodes under that term with its teaser, author, etc.

Can someone recommend to me the best way to modify a specific taxonomy term such that when it is accessed, it will list only the node title and author (and perhaps some other field)?

In the past, I've simply hacked code to do this, but since I tend to do this for every Drupal installation I do, I'm wondering if someone can help me with the design of a module that will allow this. Iknow that there's a number of modules that will provide lists, such as project and forums, but I would ideally like this to NOT look like a forum. I really want to have customized fields for the node that are displayed. In theory, this kind of display would cooperate very well with flexinode so you candisplay a summary list of flexinodes with appropriate information.

What I want to do with my Drupal site is to maintain a community of role-players. I want players to be able to maintain their own characters online and to access other people's characters. I am thinking of creating a flexinode type to represent a character, and placing them all under a taxonomy "Characters". When someone browsing the site clicks on "Characters", they get a table displaying the character's name and the player's name. I don't want to use a book because it's not really a book, and although the forum works, it's not as nice to want to access a character list, and then you stumble across a forum page.

Somebody created the filter for text processing by rules of typographics?

Could someone point me in the right direction on some samples/docs on inter-module communication? I'm working on a few modules that I want to support other modules to send data to process.

For example: I'm working on a personal page that lists all of your recent posts thats publically viewable and I want to support non-node based modules (ie: bookmark module) to be able to send data to the content page.

Sample

Is there a better way to accomplish this?

I'm about to add a relatively simple feature to a custom module I'm working on that creates another tab on the "view"/"edit" tab list which allows you to copy the fields of an existing node into the form fields of a new node. My current concern is mainly for flexinode nodes, but I would suspect that other node types would also be supported. The main goal is to speed up repetitive data entry tasks.

My question is this: should I make this as a separate module? Would anybody find this useful?

Is it possible to make Flexinode use GD or the standard image functions in PHP?

My host doesn't have Imagemagick, and I want it to create thumbnails.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Mr Maggoo

p.s. I'm using Drupal and flexinode 4.5.1