Module development and code questions

Is there a way to style the output of the Table Manager Module? I would like to be able to change the font colour and zebra stripe the <tr> tags.

What I need to do

1. Users authenticate to my site using the Pubcookie. I have the Pubcookie installed and working fine.
2. In order for Pubcookie to work, I have to set my user registration settings to "Visitors can create accounts and no administrator approval is required."
3. I do not want users to be able to create accounts except as happens automatically when they authenticate through Pubcookie
4. I especially do not want anyone to be able "hijack" an account that hasn't been created yet by Pubcookie--e.g., I go in and create the Drupal account joe@domain.edu before joe logs in with Pubcookie and creates his account automatically.

Ref: http://www.newlyweds-uk.com/user/jan_harney

How do I prevent the Mailhandler showing up in my user profiles?

Hi! I'm writing a module that makes use of views in the database. However, MySQL 4.1 doesn't support views. How can I determine the database type and version (this is also necessary) easily, so that I can modify my module (and .install) to not try and make a view if the database doesn't support it?

Okay. I've got a site. The site has a big legacy database of book reviews with a seriously mangled and crufty back-end. I load the data into a database, and set up a little Drupal module to query it and show pretty results. Yay. Now, to work on a little interface to edit/submit book reviews. (The reviews are submitted by email to one of the site's administrators, who then uploads them.) Drupal's form API comes to the rescue. Yayness! I have a mostly-working form in moments.

Problem. Book reviews have book authors. That is authors, plural. An arbitrary number of authors. (In practice, no more than 6). We also have book reviewers (never any more than 2 of those, though). I need to get these authors names' into the database.

So. How does one handle this sort of a setup? It's easy enough to set up a select box with the MULTIPLE attribute -- in fact, I've already done it, for some subject/geographic/time period codes associated with the reviews -- but that's for a mostly fixed set of codes; most reviews have a totally unique author.

I suppose I could create some fixed number of text fields and number them 1 to 6 (and hope we have no more than 6 authors). But I'm hoping for a better way... I have an idea for a terribly ugly little hack using JavaScript and a multiple-select element, but I'm not to happy with that, either.

I am creating a module and having some difficulty getting what to me seems to me general information.

For instance, I need to get information about the current node. I know you can use global $user, but I don't need user information, I need the node id for the current page so I can get taxonomy information for that particular node and do some of my own queries.