Transparent Surface Material?

Can someone please tell me how to set up a material that isn’t just transparent, but also has most (if not all) of the “capabilities” that an opaque material has? It should be used for things like glass, a crystal shard and stuff like that. So I need it to be lit like other materials and to have a specular or metallic effect.

I think by playing around with the material settings (especially the lighting part) I managed to enable lighting and a normal map, but no shinyness :frowning:

And another question about transparent materials:

Is there something I can do to prevent multiple visible surfaces of the same transparent material behind one another to cause that area to become brighter/darker than other areas?