[support] advice on how to tag articles as exclusive to certain roles for a specific timeframe?

[Brian Tully]

I hope this post is appropriate in this list. If not please accept my 
apology.

As  Drupal newbie I was hoping to get some advise on how to accomplish 
what I feel is something very simple, yet being unfamiliar with Drupal 
seems very difficult for me.

I'd like to be able to add several form fields to an article (node) that 
would allow an administrator/author to specify if it is exclusive to a 
specific role.

If so I'd like a pulldown menu that allows me to select which role it 
should be exclusive to.

Then I'd like start date and end date fields to specify when this 
article should remain exclusive (the idea being that once it's past the 
end date it will no longer be exclusive and therefore be available to 
everyone).

So far I've tried using CCK along with the Date module and JsTools 
(jscalendar).

First off I cannot get jscalendar to work at all. no calendar is visible 
when you click on the text field, even though it is specified.

Secondly, there doesn't seem to be any way of requring that if the 
exclusive checkbox is checked that the Role pulldown and startdate and 
enddate fields are completed. I appear to only be able to say that the 
start date and end date are required, even though they should not be if 
the exclusive checkbox is not checked.

Third, I'm not sure how using CCK I would add a pulldown menu that 
dynamically gets filled with all roles. Is this possible?

Last, how does one go about adding special validation to a node so that 
if specific fields are checked that other fields are required, if 
they're not checked then the other fields are not required, etc.? Is 
this beyond the scope of CCK?  If so, how would you recommend 
accomplishing this?

Any advice, insight, reference links would be GREATLY appreciated.

best regards,
brian