Module development and code questions

Hi

I was wondering if there are any developers who will be willing to enhance the station.module or the audio.module or the shoutcast.module so that users can setup their own radio stations or just supply a radio listener link and it is listed in a Radio Stations section of the site, so that users can listen any radio link of choice, and vote for top radio of the week.

The module should be able to pick up whether a certain stream is on/off air and display an on/off air icon respectively

I'm developing a module that will allow users to run a contests on their site. The idea is very simple: admin creates a contest giving it some title and description and two time periods - one called 'entry period' and second 'voting period'. during first period users can only post their work to participate in the contest (ie, image and some short description of it). during 'voting period' which comes next, users can vote on others submissions. no matter the rules right now, lets stick to the idea. one user = one vote.
now my question is, should i create a new node type for this module or not? in docs you can read Before creating a new node type, first decide if you really need to create a new one... and then comes part about CCK and Views. well, i don't think if using CCK and Views is a good idea for this kind of task... but i may be wrong as i'm not too familiar with these two modules.

i've already started the 'not node' approach but i'm in doubt. after two days of work i'm starting to think that i should have created a new node type for my module. for now i think that in fact the best approach would be to create two node types - one for the contest itself and the other for contest entries that relate to certain contest nodes.

I note the excellent cPanel module for automating the creation of mailboxes through cPanel.

Does anyone have any idea if this has been done or could be done for hsphere (a different control panel provided by some webhosts)?

There is quite frequent necessity in modules hooks sequence reordering.
The simple method is to change module's 'weight' in the 'system' table.
But this influences all the module's hooks, while I don't want to reorder they all.

Say we have 3 modules: mod1, mod2, mod3.
And for example I want for hook_form_alter the following sequence:

-mod3_form_alter()
-mod2_form_alter()
-mod1_form_alter()

and for hook_nodeapi() I need:

-mod1_nodeapi()
-mod2_nodeapi()
-mod3_nodeapi()

I need to post-process a disknode after it has been added. I attempted hook_nodeapi in my module but it seems that the file has not yet been processed by the disknode hook_nodeapi. Since the disknode.module populates the $node with info such as mimetype, filesize, etc I must wait until after it completes its processing. I tried modifying the module weight but that did not seem to help.

Hi,

I was wondering if the autosave module will also save any/all custom cck fields (not just title and body)? FYI, I am using v5 rc2, and php5.
Just seeing if anyone else has had experience with this...

thanks!