Module development and code questions

Greetings,

I'm very new to drupal, and I'm getting started trying by trying to create a new module which will allow registered users full access to a set of public and private forums, but guests will only have read access to public forums. Here's where I've got to so far. (This is with drupal v4.5 downloaded from this site a couple of days ago, running on WinXP Home on Apache with a MySQL backend.)

Created a new module named pforums.module and a new table named pforum. Both are more or less clones of forum.module and forum table. All references to forum in pforum.module are replaced by pforum.

Added code to create and check two new privileges in pforums_perm and pforums_access so I can configure roles to be able to view/post to pforums.

Amended pforums_menu to check "access pforum topics" rather than "access content" when checking if a user can read the contents of pforum.

This allows me to have two forum types: pforums and forums. Assign read/write privileges to registered user role and no privileges to guests. This works fine. All users can read the public forums and only registered users can read the pforums.

However, here it gets tricky. I want users to be able to use tracker.module to list past forum posts, but I don't want guests to be able to list the pforum posts. Unfortunately tracker.module lists all recent content based on the contents of the node table. Although if a guest clicks on the header of a pforum post he gets an "Access denied" page, even so I would prefer for this particular site if those headers weren't visible in the first place.

In the event.module is there a way to not display time?
e.g. some events last all day, instead of start at some hour...

i've tried this trick, http://drupal.org/node/11660, but it doesn't work for me...

I'd like to customize the image module and add a few text fields. Is it even possible? I also checked out the flexinode.module and it would be perfect, except it doesn't have enough features for manipulating images, like it doesn't create thumbnails and doesn't resizes the images. Any help would be highly appreciated. Thx!

I would like to change the number of nodes on the frontpage.

In nodes.module there is a function node_page_default that looks like it controls this. But changing the 10 it feeds into pager_query to some other value has no effect. Nor does changing the 10 that is feeded to theme('pager'...

Am I looking in the wrong place?

I'm running 4.5 and I'm trying to sort out my navigation using the menus module... I've created a menu item called "Competition" with another item, "Terms and Conditions" under it (it's parent is set to "Competition.")

"Competition" has a weight of -6. "Terms and Conditions" has a weight of -6 as well. (I've tried it with -5 as also.)

Competition edit disable delete
- Terms and Conditions edit disable delete

My problem is this: when I click on "Competition," it doesn't expand to show "Terms and Conditions."

I'm needing the ability to draw many-to-many relationships between different node types and am wondering if anyone is working on this functionality.