Module development and code questions

is there a shoutbox or a way to set up the shoutbox so that evey user has thier own shoutbox in thier user profile

user comments would also work fine for what i am looking for

We've been working with the e-commerce module and haven't had too many difficulties. Our custom product types have integrated well and our configuration seems fine. What puzzles us is, how would a user pick up an incomplete transaction?

Our users choose their payment type (credit card or PayPal), confirm their billing address, and then review the order. Upon clicking the "Place your order" button, the items are removed from the cart (change in transaction type, I believe) and then they're presented with a "Credit Card Payment" screen which requests their name, cc, code, exp, etc.

for example, I want to search a bookreview(bookreview.module) by Author 、Publisher or ISBN .

I am just starting out in drupal and wondered how I get access to the user id for a person who is logged in.

I have date form field and a task name that I would like to insert into my mysql database.

My test insert statement is:

$query = "INSERT INTO qatask_task (task_name,start_sched) VALUES (\"$task_name\",\"$start_sched\")"

The fields from my form are assigned to variables before this (i.e $task_name = $form_values['task_name']) for ease of reading and requirements I have for this design.

I would like to extend the Voting Module to display voting criteria on mulitple axis for a particular type of node. It should also create an average score based on an aggregate calculation on all of the axis. I love the simplicity of the voting module and would like to extend the functionality to accomplish the above.