Module development and code questions

Does anyone know how I could go about adding a filter to views that sorts by length of text? (node title field in this case)

I've searched up and down and couldn't find any hints on how to go about this.

How might one easily turn the "LI" style LIST of on line Users into a Comma separated list of users?

I have read all the documentation for the Views module and have even done some poking around the codebase, but for the life of me, can't figure out how to do this:

I have a module which creates albums of images. I have created an AJAX mechanism for sorting the images within album and a callback that saves the node id and order id of the images once they've been moved. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to use that order table to order the images upon presenting the view of the album. I've added a hook_views_tables function (see below) and have tried to programatically use $view->sort (see below) to modify the query that gets built as part of views_build_view. Unfortunately, the query that view builds doesn't join the order table with the nodes table.

Why not? What am I missing? If I look in the view tables, nothing is saved there? I assume that's a symptom of my follow.

function acidfree_views_tables() {
    $table = array(
        'name' => 'acidfree_order',
        'join' => array(
            'left' => array(
                'table' => 'node',
                'field' => 'nid'
            ),
            'right' => array(
                'field' => 'nid'
            )
        )
    );
    $tables['acidfree_order'] = $table;
    return $tables;
}


$view->sort[0] = array(
'vid' => $view->vid,

Hello!

I got the Zend Studio Debugging IDE working with my drupal installation, heres how i got it to work

http://dgtlmoon.com/zend_studio_debugging_and_drupal_on_php_5_x

I know i saw a module and i believe it is used on BRYGHT sites that turns the admin menu into a nice unobtrusive set of tabs at the top of the admin page and I can't find it after extensive searching through the all too massive module repository.

also is there a way to search only in the modules. there are way to many to scroll through and the attempt to categorize by type is not that helpful.

I am writing my first module and creating a custom form. I don't really see how to combine two form elements on the same line. Or at least not one on top of the other. Any ideas or examples?