Module development and code questions

I've read a bit in the forums about the effort to enhance user access levels, such as per node, and based on taxonomy. I just read that groups.module for 4.4 isn't working yet. I am trying to figure out how to hack the blog module to make it accessible to everyone - annonymous users - and then any other defined roles, while keeping the rest of the "content" non-accessible to annonymous users.

problem:there alwasy displays a "0" in tag "view inbox (0) "
debug:the function "privatemsg_link" on privatemsg.module line 16 should include this code "global $user;"

I am wanting a mod to have the submission queue rating option to be next to the comments at the bottom of a blog post? So that its easy for people to just click on + or - to rate it and move on?

Has anyone modded this or figured out a way to do this? I have seen it on some sites, but I dont have the PHP ability. Infact I have none. I have given it a crack but I am getting extremely frustrated.

My drupal module allows the user to specify an interest in sections of the
site so that we can send targeted e-mails to our users when we feel we
have news of interest to them.

In order to create a module that is not specific to our organisation and
of use to others I've decided to create the list of interests in the
drupal database as the table upd_interests. I then query this table during
the edit_form hook so that the list of interests are displayed as
checkboxes. So far so good, and the data is actually stored in the user
serialisation. My table looks something like

mysql> select * from upd_interests;
+-----+-----------------------------+-------------+
| iid | name                        | description |
+-----+-----------------------------+-------------+
|   1 | Broadcasting and Webcasting |             |
|   2 | Medicines                   |             |
|   3 | Digital Media               |             |
|   4 | Music                       |             |
|   5 | Software                    |             |
|   6 | Textbooks                   |             |
|   7 | Traditional Knowledge       |             |
+-----+-----------------------------+-------------+

The expression of interest is stored as a boolean value in the user
serialisation.

$rs = db_query("select * from upd_interests");
while ($r = db_fetch_object($rs)){

I have added in my site a new module to borrow books. I need adding dynamically in my page the date of the day the loan is made in. I'm a beginner... Help me, please! Thanks!

Anyone planning to update the Amazon module to 4.4?