Forum hacks

Hi, I was working a little in the Pear DB support for Forum, it works but still need some reviews. Are there too much problems if we only leave Pear DB as the only DB layer? (could simplify a lot the task of maintaining this sutff). What I would do next is work in the Template/skin system. The actual system need to "program" the templates thing that I find a little complex comparing with the easy of a traditional template engine. I'll change that to use a real template engine if nobody has problems. My question is ... what class to use? ITX, Smarty, TplFoo1, TplFoo2? (I really don't want to start a flame war here :). Other things I'm missing is to a system to pre-validate posts, is there something done in this area? I see that the auth stuff isn't also implemented (guess that waiting for a Pear_User class, btw what is the status of that?). Perhaps for the moment we could modify a little the Forum DB User class to be configurable to retrieve some info like user name, e-mail, login, pass from other tables, that can be easily changeable/extendable when the Pear_User class is done. It could be nice to see more people working in Forum :-) Tomas V.V.Cox