Great I'll be doing what I can to help with that. I think there are good cases for both solutions and ideally to allow the site owner to decide at the point of themeing. I definitely like the idea of forum posts as nodes and will be exploring the idea of a couple of ideas related to creating structured arrays for lists like forum nodes, comments, and outlines and having properties set on branches or leafs of the array that will then be rendered through a theme function to allow the greatest flexibility for site owners. There are certainly some performance hurdles and that's a lot to try to get into D7. Another (possibly related) need I see is the ability to easily render lists like forum posts in different styles in the same site (instead of relying on a site-wide default). For example the ability to have a flat-forum for the forums area while maintaining the threaded display of comments on blog posts.
There may also be some more edge-cases like the ability to show the last four top-level comments on a case-tracker post.
Great I'll be doing what I can to help with that. I think there are good cases for both solutions and ideally to allow the site owner to decide at the point of themeing. I definitely like the idea of forum posts as nodes and will be exploring the idea of a couple of ideas related to creating structured arrays for lists like forum nodes, comments, and outlines and having properties set on branches or leafs of the array that will then be rendered through a theme function to allow the greatest flexibility for site owners. There are certainly some performance hurdles and that's a lot to try to get into D7. Another (possibly related) need I see is the ability to easily render lists like forum posts in different styles in the same site (instead of relying on a site-wide default). For example the ability to have a flat-forum for the forums area while maintaining the threaded display of comments on blog posts.
There may also be some more edge-cases like the ability to show the last four top-level comments on a case-tracker post.