Where might I look to learn what I need to know to create brief processes (a chain of changes) which trigger given a single input?
Whether all date+initials cards are formatted to include commonly used fields, or are just Basic cards, the Blog post creation process would be uniform across the site.
Does this qualify as a Module?
Yes this would be a module (or "pack"), but it requires the half of the packs API which has not yet been implemented: the events api.
That should be ready (and documented) in version before the Wagn 2.0 release.