Post installation

I'm using shared hosting. I'd like to be able to do work on the content of my live site offline. I have two questions:

1: What provisions do you make for adding/removing modules to a Drupal production site so that there are reduced chances of errors/bugs etc. occuring?

I've just added poll module and notised that I don't get any linebreaks between the polls. I don't get it! When looking in the page source I can see that there is a br-tag:

I'm trying to accomplish something that is very simple if I just edit the template directly, that is, add two images with some links below them to a specific part of the page.

But, I want to allow the users of the site to change the images, text, and links.

Is there an easy way to accomplish this using Drupal's system? I'm in effect asking several questions on how to use Drupal properly with this.

Basically, it's a very simple front page design:

-- LOGO | Banner -- {He
-- N A V B A R -- ader - already set}

Node 1/               Image 1/link     Image 2/link
Home page          Text w/ links     Text w/ links
{currently added        {both of these are currently divs with embedded
as content>>Node1}       < img> tags in my page-front.tpl.php file}

F O O T E R

If you extremely experienced Drupallers can help me figure out how to accomplish this simply, I'd really appreciate it. My current understanding is that I need to edit the template.php, define my own blocks, then call these blocks from page-front.tpl.php and position them. Am I on the right track?

On this same track, how do I best allow users to upload images via Drupal so that they can map to them inside of these blocks or whatever? I'm looking at the Img_Assist module along with TinyMCE and/or possibly Filebrowser.

I'm using Drupal primarily as a blog. I'd like the feed that comes off of it to be a full feed containing entire posts. However, it *seems* that Drupal uses the < !-- break -- > tag to determine how much content to feed out in an entry. It *seems* that entries in which I've broken it up with the < !-- break --> tag are only fed out up to the tag and entries that I haven't 'broken' feed out in their entirety.

First off - am I right about the behaviour? And second - is there any way to get Drupal to output a full feed regardless of my usage of the break tag?

User Account Creation would be a lot more friendly if the user could create a password as part of the registration process.

Now the user gets an e-mail, has to copy and paste an ugly password and then create a new password upon registration. I'm glad that upon first log-in the user is taken to a password change place. But the bad side of that is that the first impression of the site is an admin page. (Content on my site is only viewable for registered users.)

I'm curious if these possibility was added in 4.7.

I am running 4.7 beta 6. I had a drupal installed at foobar.com and then had a menu item to a directory at foobar.com/somedir. This is with the clean urls turned on. I moved the somedir and someone clicked on the link. Drupal detected the link was no longer good and removed it. Now the somedir is back but the link still won't work. I have removed and added back the menu item and I have run the cron.

Any clue how to add that menu item back?