Request - Make forums appear more like Classifieds?

[oldford]

I posted this in the VB2 Requests forums a few months ago, but no responses. I'm going to try again in VB3 hoping that maybe coders are more likely to mod VB3 now that it's out.

I've read several posts about integrating a full classifieds script with VB, but I thought this might be a nice compromise and a little easier to hack.

Basically this hack would add some new input fields when a new thread is started in certain forums. In addition to the "subject" and "message" fields I'd also like to add fields like "state", "city", "price", etc.

The new values would be required and be displayed as the first few lines of text in the message body.

The value from the "state" field would also be shown in front of the subject line (ie: NY - Cool stuff for sale) so people can easily see if the item is in their area just by looking at the message index.

There would need to be a way to select which forums would get these new fields. (Probably in Modify Forums-->Edit area of Admin section)
I don't know how hard this mod is, but it seemed a lot simpler than trying to create a full classified system from scratch or other script.

Thanks for any input!