I'm in lovely sunny Wellington this week working on some WSS samples using the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.1 (or more easily pronounced VissyWiss).  One of the samples requires the use of a Module Project Item.  There is surprisingly little documentation - official or otherwise - on what a module does and how to use it - at least, not that we can find.  So, here's my contribution - hopefully correct.

A Module Project Item is used to deploy files to any(?) part of your WSS installation.  You specify the source of the item to copy as a file path relative to the module, and the destination as a url path relative to the site root.  This all sounds very simple, but the problem is that there are 2 urls and 2 paths so there are several permitations possible and not all of them work!

When you add a Module Project Item to your project (Site def, Empty def etc) you will get an XML file called Module.xml in a folder.  Our one looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements Id="b43cb805-eebf-421a-83d3-c2a6cb8afa10" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
  <Module Name="module_training" Url="images">
    <File Url="WORD_icon.jpg" Path="module_training\WORD_icon.jpg" Type="Ghostable" />
  </Module>
</Elements>


Module Url: This is where the files will be copied to.  The url is relative to the site root.
File Path: Path to the file relative to the project in Visual Studio.
File Type: This can only be Ghostable or GhostableInLibrary.  You can only use GhostableInLibrary if the module Url is for a List, such as Shared Documents.

<Module> also has a Path attribute but we dont need it for this operation.

The module will create folders if they dont exist so in the above example we are copying an image to the root images folder, but this could easily be "customimages" and the folder will be created.

There's more to Modules but that is all I have for now.  I'll update when I know how to do Wildcards :)