Module development and code questions

My forum uses a fork of SMF (heavily modified by myself) that implements paid subscriptions along with some other features I needed (post moderation, improved notifications, a couple other things). I discovered Drupal some time after coding all this, and I'm adding this to my site. There have been a few obstacles to overcome:

(1) There are serious name collisions between SMF and Drupal. Since my copy of SMF is so heavily modified I'd never do a standard upgrade again anyway, I just changed the variable names on the SMF side. That took an hour or two and it's working fine now.

(2) I managed to integrate the two interfaces by making a custom SMF theme that uses frames. My regular navigation bar from SMF is on the left, and Drupal is the page content on the right. I coded the SMF navigation links to target _parent so it breaks out of the frame if a non-Drupal link is clicked. I made this look virtually identical to the other pages on my site by making a custom Drupal theme using straight PHP. I needed the flexibility of straight PHP, and that's easier for me that learning an engine. I use the SMF header and suppress the Drupal header. I used Drupal's primary links to duplicate the buttons across the top of each page on my site. The only way you can tell the frame version from the non-frame version is that the navigation bar for the frame version has a scroll bar.

(3)...

I want to use Drupal to create something like Bloglines on my site - users have their own blogs (as Drupal already provides), and can choose whether to make these blogs public or private (which Drupal does NOT support). Ideally, I'd like users to be able to create their own personal "access lists" - people who can view their blogs.

HI

How do I raise the limit on the maximum number of characters allowable in a blog title? A number of the scientific articles I blog are cut off at the knees, since they are a tad longer than the current limit. Can I raise the limit to 255 characters?

Thanks for your help.

Shayne

I am looking for a bibliography module that maintains a bibliography comprising of books and papers.
Each bibliography will item could have the following attributes:
Title, Author, URL , Abstract, Publication Location, Publisher, Publication Date, Volume, Issue, Pages and notes

I want to display the entries in a tabular format and allow the users to sort on title, authos, publication date, and
date added.

I want a button in the form like this (not a submit button but a button type button):

<input class="form-submit" name="op" value="New" type="button">

I use this code:

 $form['New'] = array(
  '#type' => 'button',
  '#value' => t('New'),
  '#weight' => 19,
);

....but I obtain a submit button like this:

I'm trying to modify the display of my event calednar in list form to include the location. My PHP knowledge is very limited, but I'm trying to use "$node->event_location" to call up the location using this line:

  $output .= '<div class="location">'. t('Location') .': '. $node->event_location ."</div>\n";

This brings up "Location :" in the listing, but nothing more. I'm using the event module with flexinode and I'm at a loss as to what string I need to call up to display the location.