[horde] Newbie development question

[Barsalou]

I posted this here because I thought others who don't follow the
development list might gain from this, but will gladly post in the dev
list if that is more appropriate.

In my quest to learn how things work, I copied the hermes module and
made a new module called hermtest...everything fine there.

I then wanted to add a new variable to the form...just to see that I
could do it.  After some head banging, I figured out what needed to be
done.  Turns out, it was pretty straight forward.  In my travels,
several questions came to my mind and I was hoping that someone would
guide me gently in the right direction.

1. When looking for the _addVariable function (which I eventually found
in Form.php) I found it difficult to locate.  I eventually found it by
back tracking through the classes.  The 'index of elements' link at the
dev.horde.org site was very helpful.  Is there a shortcut I can take
advantage of?

2. I am assuming that the information that is listed in the method is
the only info about the fields.  Some of it was self explanatory, but
some I am not sure of the purpose.  Example:  the $required parameter
was pretty easy to figure out, but the mixed params is not clear to me.

3. I realized that because I am adding a new value to the TimeForm, that
there will be more than one location that will need to be modified. 
What ways do others use to locate all the possible spots that I might
also need to change?  Is testing the ONLY way to know, or are there
other ways that work well too?

Thanks for producing such good software and making it Open Source.

Mike