Module development and code questions

Hiya!

Before I ask this...a mini-disclaimer:

I love drupal and am an avid supporter, promoter of the project. I have evaluated many CMS & community management/development tools for the web and drupal is miles ahead of anything else out there in my opinion.

The module list is getting very long. Which is great and in the spirit of open source, I know, but, am just curious about the following i.e. the risk of malicious modules, security, zen and the art of sleeping at night:

Hello,

I'm new to Drupal and to this Forum.

I need some help. I've developed a couple custom modules for a client, and now I'm on my third.

The module is for a list of Top 10's. (If I get it working, I'll submit it to the site).

I have a function for adding/editing and deleting Top 10 lists and it's called topten_configure(). I loads fine from a menu item under admin/topten.

I have a block and I want to have the list of Top 10's show up there and if a user clicks on the title of a list, they get the full list.

Is there any planned support for image module and 4.6? I ask because I find no reference to it, which is perhaps essential for drupal. The present version (4.5 cv) is one of the few to break drupal.

I use the Codefilter Module and when I write the code between "code tags" it works.
But when I use the only output I get is this:

?

Here's my Code:

if(count($links)==1){
  array_pop($links);
}
else{
  $lastItem = array_pop($links);
  $lastItem = strip_tags($lastItem);

  $links[] = t($lastItem);
 
}
return $links;

Any suggestions?

meinolf
learn-php.de

Hello,

I want to design an output filter that converts external URLs in all nodes to a format like "/exit.php?go=$URL", where exit.php is a PHP script that maintains statistics on what external URLs my visitors go to.

I looked at filter.module and it seems the HTML/PHP filters are all built in. I don't want to patch the filter.module though, if it can be avoided. How would I go about designing such a module? Where do I need to plug in?

Would anyone see a benefit in the creation of a module that automates the process of installing modules?

Every time i need to add a module I go about the the same process, and it seems like there is already a standard "packaging" that each module must adhere to, so why not automate this process with a module?

Almost all modules (that require more than drag-drop) include:

directory: /
db script: .mysql (sometimes a .pgsql --- this could be handled too)
module: .module
---
etc: some other stuff that I don't care about.