Module development and code questions

I'm not sure if this is the best forum to raise this issue, but here goes:

I have been working with a client to put together a website that will compile information about "best practices" in an issue that is highly-politicized, but shouldn't be. Our goal is to put together materials -- in the form of interviews, transcripts, reports, surveys, meeting minutes -- attached to a "country" taxonomy, that also needs to be cross-referenced by date or date range.

Our desire is to present events about which people have conflicting perceptions on "one page" so to speak by presenting the materials in chronological order so that the participants can get a good picture of what one groups perceptions of events was vs another groups at any particular time.

I've thought about approaching this as a taxonomy problem, but after ruminating a bit about it, it seems to be a new category of thing to track for each node.

I'm pretty new to MySQL/PHP, but I'm wondering if a new date field in node combined with a slightly modified story interface would do the trick (at least for the data gathering). Ideally, it would be cool if a user could go to country, click on a year or month, and then get a chronological listing of material related to that country.

I'm just floundering around right now. The client doesn't have development $ this fiscal year, but may have some money next FY (it's a govt. agency so they may have money again in October). Does anyone have any thoughts/ideas how I might go about approaching this problem?

Is there any dircetory module? I'm need to create different types of contetn on my site. There must be news (drupal pages or stories) and directory/database on hotels, businesses, e.t.c. Early i was planning to create new node type module but after reading this http://drupal.org/node/view/2125 i'm not sure this is are good way.

Has anyone attempted to create a "post here" module; in other words, if a user wanted to add content, they would automatically do so directly in the taxonomy that they are currently viewing?

I believe that would be easier for users, if they are viewing a specific category, the posting page would not ask them where they wanted to post and they wouldn't have the opportunity to make a mistake.

Of couse they could still use the regular "create content" link for universal access.

Some of you have probably noticed my filehandler.module which is in my sandbox. It's a combination of the fileapi and nodeapi which gives the module it's power to let you attach any file to any node-type.

What i want to know is what people expect from a filehandler. You can upload documents, images, audio, video or whatever kind of files to your items (nodes).

I submitted a new module (signup) months back in April. Since then, I have added a CVS tree, and a sample site. A few other people have used it. However, I can't edit this information until the module is approved.

Is there anything I can do to get the module approved?

I'm trying my best to use the nodeapi hooks to mail a certain subset of users when a node is changed from 'unpublished' to 'published', which from observing the database, apears to be when $node->status changes from 0 to 1. I asume I should be using the "update" hook, with a little trickery to make sure I only send e-mails the first time an "update" is performed and status=1.

I wrote the following code, however I see no output from any of the print statements when I publish a node from the content administration page.