Module development and code questions

First of all, sorry for my terrible english, but I hope that you help me :)

I want to use dashboard as front page. But now I only have a link to my dashboard on frontpage (and "Dashboards have no teaser, sorry."), though I have checked "promote to front page". In settings of site I didn't find function 'use this page as front'...

Russian version of this text:

Hi I'm interested to know of the current status of the 'stores' module where every user can have their own store? I have just downloaded the ecommerce module for 4.7 but I did not see any stores module to enable (unlike 4.6). What can the stores module do now? Specifically how does the stores module work from a customer's point of view: do they purchase using a central payments account.

Sorry if I'm too general, but I'm trying to evaluate this module and am finding it hard to find suitable documentation for it.

I thought this would be easy, but can't figure it out. In a module how can I find the absolute path to the drupal directory? I can find the path to the module (both relative to drupal basepath and absolute), but not to drupal itself.

Hi, I'm the web developer for a non-profit independent library whose been using drupal for about a year now. I'm currently trying to develop a simple searchable catalog for items. So far, the best and easiest combo I've found is flexisearch + flexinode. However, flexisearch seems wraught with bugs that aren't being addressed (such as the search engine doesn't limit it searched to specified flexinodes and it also returns duplicates).

Does anyone know of an alternative to what I'm working with now? Or are their flexisearch patches that I've been missing?

I have some experience with Drupal (20+ installs/configurations) but have not really spent much time "under the hood" creating modules etc. untill recently.

I would like to create a new content type and would like to use a different id/ primary key, pid (player id) as opposed to nid or cid

Does anyone have experience with this kind of thing? Is it just a matter of writing my table that way, and designing my DB calls in to pull that content? Are there other factors that I should consider? API/compatability nightmares down the road?

I wanted to customize the login block (in 4.7) in a way that can't be done with just string replacement, i.e. adding some div and span tags. It appears that logintoboggan used to do this, but decided that it was no longer needed in 4.7.