Module development and code questions

Hi.
Is there a way to have a term for a taxonomy vocabulary and a url alias created at the same time?

So I could add 'projects' to the vocab 'menu' and have it create the url alias 'menu/projects' ?
It would be really usefull, I'm not afraid of diving into some code, and it has to be postgres based...

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

I'm working on a module (which I have briefly described here), and want to redirect the output while displaying a message.

In short, I use the nodeapi hook and "validate" switch to check whether the node is available for editing or not (unavailable means it has been logically locked by another user). If the node is not available, then I want to display the node in "view" mode, not in "edit" mode, with a warning message.

I've installed the e-commerce module 4.5 in drupal 4.5 (not 4.5.1) and file download is not aparently working. I host a website for artists and musicians, and mp3 downloads are crucial. I've offered each track at a low price, ala iTunes, and they are supposed to be a simple, paid, direct download; but it's non-functional. I tried it out a purchase using my girlfriends paypal account and found that nowhere during the process was there a link to the file that was purchased.

I want to put a little star next to usernames of people that belong to a certain role. I was trying to use user_access() to check, but that gets me accessrules for the logged in user, not for the user who wrote the node|comment.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! BY the way, I'm making changes in common.inc to do this, Should I look somewhere else instead? First time module hacker...

Before I post this a feature request, wondering if anyone has tried something like this? What happens when a user has their own blog somewhere else and wants to syndicate it your drupal site. I suppose with blogger they could just dump html into their own blog and never touch it again, although the entries would be grouped weird. I was thinking it would be cool if there was an option for a user to enter the RSS of their blog from another site, and somehow have the content show up in their own blog. Is this possible that anyone knows of?

Still working on a very simple "check-out" module. I have looked at the discussion about locking nodes to prevent concurrent competing updates, however this does not really address my problem which is actually very standard in document management systems.

The purpose of the module is very simple: whenever a user edits a node, the module "checks out" the node for editing, by applying an exclusive logical edit lock to the node. This prevents anybody else from editing the node until the lock is removed.
The big difference with the proposal described in the link above lies in the removal of the lock, which is done by the requesting user "checking in" the document when he has finished editing. To allow this the module will provide:
a) an extra checkbox in the node edit form: if the user leaves this unchecked, then the lock is removed when the "submit" button is pressed; if the user leaves it checked, then the lock remains in place AFTER the submit button has been pressed. The document is now "checked out" and will remain locked for editing by anybody other than the person who checked it out.
b) an adminstration module for "checking in" documents which got forgotten by their editors for example.

I'm not planning anything sophisticated (no version control etc etc), and the module is basically all cribbed from path.module.

However, I would like to tidy up the error handling: at the moment, if a user tries to edit a "checked out" node, I can easily get the module to provide an error message to the user in the node EDIT view. However, this is not very satisfactory since the purpose of the error message is to inform the user that the node is inaccessible for editing because already checked out by another user. I really want to provide an error message and display the node VIEW view (a bit like the nice green message you get when you've finished editing). But I can't see how to switch the flow from within nodeapi away from EDIT and towards VIEW.