Module development and code questions

I've got an idea...but I need to bounce it off you guys first.

It revolves around CCK and how much I like it. The one thing it's lacking for me is that it doesn't work with the taxonomy_block.module.

I've figured out why: Taxonomy_block joins node to node_revisions and looks for the existence of a teaser and a body.

Since CCK abstracts itself out of the traditional node/node_revisions table structure, those fields are empty for any nodes I've created using CCK.

I would like to create a view that sorts by flexinode fields.

I thought views works with flexinode, but I don't see where to do that. I made a flexinode. I began creating a view. I wanted to add a filter that would be a term in a field of the flexinode. However, I see taxonomy terms that I can choose from for the filter. I don't see anything related to flexinodes.

I searched and didn't come up with anything.
I looked through the issues for views and found node 27661 where someone asked how to use views with flexinodes, but there was no answer.

Is there a way to check if a particular module is installed and/or activated?

Hello all. I am new to the entire drupal scene still, and now that the academic semester is winding down I am cranking up my drupal developement. Anywho, I am trying to create two things, but they are related to each other. I am attempting create a content type and a module that will allow me to create menu driven system that stirs away from the blog look and feel. I am trying to acomplish this by using blocks, content types, and taxonomy. I have added an extra table called vocabulary_department which holds the vid and varchar that represents a departments name. I am in the middle of constructing a block that will ask you for which department you want to create a block for, and after choosing the department it will create a block with a list of all the vocabulary names the department is associated with as hyper links. These links will point to nodes, for sake of discussion lets call these content types homepages. The goal of the home pages will be to display the children of the parent that directed them to that page, so clicking on a link in the block with all of the vocabularies of a specific department will give you page with all the children/terms of that vocabulary as links. Once again these links will point to homepages that will list the children, in my case would be nodes of type page, for that term in a page. Now I can accomplish this all fine and dandy with php code embeded into the body of blocks and nodes of type page, but I dont want to give not technical people heart attacks with php code, so I want to turn this concept into an offical module type deal.

Hello all! I would very much like to use Pathauto but the 128 character limit is rather annoying, so I've thought of changing it to 255 (or very close).

Has anybody else done this? Would there be any problems?

Thank you!

Right now, I think the project module is lacking in some areas. Here's what I want to be able to do with it:

1) Project heads can invite users to work on their project. Alternatively, users can apply to work on a project. Once head and user have agreed, the user gets listed on a page of users.

2) Project heads can name the positions that their workers hold. They can also upload a mini-image describing the position.