Module development and code questions

I want to try to implement the groups.module for 4.5; Is it possible that the groups.module can work at all with drupal 4.5, and if so, how do I go about it? I tried copying and pasting the patch data into the node.module file for example, but I still could not view the site. The site was working fine before the groups.module.

Our site is using forum topics as the primary organization of information, and the forum page as the primary view for users Recently, however, we wanted to add the calendar functionality offered by the event module. Having done so, we felt that it would be very useful to treat posted events as forum topics, so that as they were posted they would appear in the forum list and thus be brought to people's attention. I couldn't find a good way to achieve this blending. In the end, I hacked through the forum module, adding 'event' as another type of node on which forum did all its stuff.

In a previous post, I raised the question of stories versus forum topics, and why they were different. I seem to have run into the same sort of question again. The task of bringing a new posting to someone's attention is met ideally by the forum interface. But the calendar interface is also a natural interface to the same data at other times. In the current design, it is only the front page that is able to display arbitrary types of items, while the forum page is limited to displaying forum topics. This seems an unfortunate linkage, since the forum page is a nice interface to other topics as well---our users prefer it to the front page, because they like to see the compressed overview offered by the forum page rather than the list of expanded stories offered by the front page.

I am working on a questionnaire module, which will redirect the user after login to ask a number of questions. This is easy to do using the _user hook. However, I would also like to be able to temporarily suspend a user's access to the site, so that, until they have finished entering the data, they cannot gain access to any site content.

I have been trying to get breadcrumbs to appear in all main module pages. I am confused as to what criteria determines if it should appear or not.

0 = none with no code on search
1 = appears

Home = 0
archives = 0
blogs = 0
books = 0
files = 1
polls = 0
search = 0
forum = 1

Can someone explain why this is this way and how I can get it to work in the modules?

It seems that two separate tables, namely term_node and forum, both keep two columns (nid and tid) defining bindings between nodes and specific taxonomy terms with which they are associated. Is there a reason for such duplication of data?

Drupal 4.5.x.

I am writing a node module in which not everyone will have read access to all nodes. This I have implemented with the _access hook for argument 'view', and it works well.

The problem is the front page. The node_page_default() routine does check node access using the new node access API, but does not use the _access hook. This means that new nodes will be published on the front page, and a user can read the 'teaser', but if he clicks on the node, he can not read the 'body'. This is a bit weird.