Module development and code questions

I'm creating a module to handle dynamic dns and bind administrative functions and I thought I'd put this out there in the hope that someone may have some ideas of the hurdles I'm going to come across. Here's a bit about the poject:

The goals are:
1) DNS Update Gateway Operation:
Allows the server running drupal to act as a gateway to update someones dns records using dynamic updates. The dns server is not neccessarily the drupal server but it could be.

2) Zone Administration:
Web interface to add and remove resource records from a zone. An administrative backend to allow modifications to all zones handled by the server and a user's front end to allow self serve to a user's own dns zone.

Appeal of drupal for this project:
User database and security system is already done and the separation of back-end and front-end functionality is useful also.

It seems like a relatively small project but no doubt it will be 3 times more consuming than I expect depending on how many features end up being implemented. My current ddns solution is in perl so to get things rolling the functions to add, remove and update dns records will just call the relative perl script but I have a view to using the pear Net::DNS to keep it all php so I'm allowing for this.

Some issues I see:
The module would add some tables to drupal and I'm not sure at this point how to make it work with the data abstraction layer. Are there docs about this somewhere - I have looked, there's so many (which is what I like about drupal coincidentally) a point in the right direction would really be appreciated.

i've been hired to build several mobile/wap/phone display module for drupal cms.

I want to do something similar to the l() function - but it don't want html markup in return.. I want just the URL which i'll then use in my custom hook to display in varying non-html markup (wml, mcd etc) or in a sms response.

Can anyone tell me the "right" way to get the correct url, i.e. including pathalias and any other changes made by other modules.

and - is there documentation somewhere for the l() function? i'm getting lost in the drupal handbook..

I currently run a site and we use the Views module to try and sort our queue in order of how many votes it has . Now this seems to work fine for our front page, but on the queue page the view sort seems to have no effort at all! The settings are identical for frontpage and for queue (expect front page has stickies above voting results and queue doesn't have anything sorting of stickies).

The criteria I've used is:

Voting result --- Descending

Works on the frontpage but not on the queue page.

Hello

I recently launched a site and am using the storylinks module for most of my content.

I want storylinks to be called downloads. I tried editing the module myself, and managed to change some references, but couldn't get it all working properly (it links in with my voting modules).

Is anyone able to do this for me?

Thanks

I'm attempting to change the default form of the Type date in one of my tables. By default it is 0000-00-00, however, I want it to be 00-00-0000. The problem is, when I change it to 00-00-0000 and click save, it simply reverts back to 0000-00-00. Why is this and/or how do I make it stick?

Thanks.

For my charity social network site (http://drupal.org/node/69729 for more info, or check the project blog www.makingthesite.com) I'm thinking about editting or perhaps even making my own module. I have some basic skills in PHP, but never built a big robust site or something with php. I'm also just figuring out Drupal. I'm wondering how hard it is to build and/or edit a module.