title: Completely redesigning the front-end for the Drupal forum
body: <p>I only have web development experience with CakePHP, and I've recently started a Drupal project.  My main task is to re-skin the Drupal forums so instead of a normal comment chain, there is a timeline of icons connected by a tree structure that display a comment when you click on them.</p>
  
  <p>This is a pretty radical overhaul, and while I'd feel confident about doing this in CakePHP, where I can just write HTML as I please, the structure of Drupal confuses me.  I've located the theme file that themes individual comments, but I'm not sure how to rewrite the page as a whole.  A forum topic appears to just be a node with comments, so I'm not completely sure how to re-theme the whole page.</p>
  
  <p>To Summarize, I need to:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Determine if any given node is a forum topic and replace the normal body with a scrollable timeline</p></li>
  <li><p>Display simple shapes representing posts taking place at a certain time on the timeline connected as a tree</p></li>
  <li><p>Hide the normal comments until the corresponding icons are clicked.</p></li>
  <li><p>Additionally, I need a way for the user to filter posts on the timeline by their tags, but once I figure out the Javascript for showing the posts, this shouldn't be terribly difficult.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Thanks for helping out a confused web dev.</p>