Module development and code questions

Is there anyway to make to add a thumbnail to an ecommerce product? It seems goofy that there isn't a place for that. Right now I'm using upload_image to show a thumb at the bottom but on the products page there's only text links. Any ideas?

i have a $form that defines $form['date'] as #tree => true, and i have subsequent form text fields for $form['date']['start_date'] and $form['date']['end_date'].

i am able to do validation and form_set_error('date', 'msg'), which outlines BOTH start_date and end_date text fields with a red error box. however, how do i outline ONLY start_date or end_date? i've tried form_set_error('start_date', 'msg') but to no avail :/

hello, desire to install the new version but of phpfreechat in drupal 4.6.8 since I can do it? some I module? 12/18/2006 - phpfreechat Release 1.0-beta8 i like install this version, thanks.

I created a module for importing some content and would like to run it as a cron job. But it appears that I need to hardcode user name and password into the module that the cron job could have permission to add content.

I tried declaring

global $user, $pass;
$user = "My Name";
$pass = "password";

but it doesn't work. What are the correct variables for user name and password in Drupal 5? Or what would be the correct way of setting a cron job that has to have administrative permissions?

Thank you.

Has anyone worked on trying to integrate a spider or other search engine into Drupal..

I was looking at trying integrate something like spihder or other web crawler into one of my sites to allow searching outside of our information with a limited number of sites.

The other thing I would like to look into is using the spider functions to provide a crawler to node integration similar to feedparser where it will put the RSS feed into a node. This would be a more plain type of look like topix.net...

I would like for a user to be able to view a node that has a status of 0 if ?var=1 is appended to the url. It's a custom node type, so it's housed in a custom module.

Can anyone think of a method to do this?