Module development and code questions

Hi, can somebody help me giving pointers on how to change userpoint.module along with ecommerce module so that whenever a person buys something, he gets some points from the deal?

Need a little help here. I am trying to gather information from multiple checkboxes but looking at the source there are no names or ids for the checkboxes so they are not being sent. I am using form_render and I don't see a #name parameter for checkbox in the docs.

I've been working on setting up my first site with Drupal for a few months now, and I've filed some issues and submitted some patches to modules.

What function or method can I use within the submit method in a module to transfer data to the following page for display without having to use drupal_set_message() method?

Drupal code snippets will highly be appreciated...

Thanking you in anticipation.

Lullabot recently did a podcast on deprecated (or soon to be deprecated) modules. One of the modules mentioned was that the Image module could soon be deprecated, in light of the advancements in CCK, most notably ImageField and ImageCache. Since I am now at the point where I need to create an image gallery for my website, I began wondering if I should try to make it work work using CCK, ImageField, ImageCache, and Views (if needed).

My question is, is there a module that allows you to arrange nodes in groupings and sub-groupings (I hesitate to use the word "galleries"). I know about Acidfree, but I don't think that it makes use of custom node types. I know about Gallery and Coppermine, but they, too, fall under the same difficulty. What I'm looking for is, I suppose, a general module that will allow custom inclusion of node types. Is there anything like that available?

I tried using views, but I could not get it to list sub-groupings alongside the regular node listings (using taxonomy as the hierarchy).

Do I need to hold off until Drupal 6 with it's new (from the book module) hierarchy module?

I really want to get away from the Image module, if possible. I don't like the alternate sizes ("thumbnail", "original", etc.) showing up in the links below the node. Plus, I think that the ImageCache filters could be expanded to include watermarking.

I have a couple of CCK content types defined on an otherwise simple drupal site and I want to add captcha to the "create a node" action, but it just isn't working. I tried implementing this http://drupal.org/node/105525 patch, to no avail. I don't get any errors, I just don't get any captcha.

I feel like I'm doing somethint stupid here. Skipping an obvious step (I do that when I'm feeling peevish).

I just moved the whole site to 5.1 for the sole purpose of implementing captcha and I've gotten myself no where.