Proposal for Drupal support of story types

This is a brief proposal to explain how I'd like to extend Drupal to support story types.

I have defined a set of story types in this website; here's what I'd like to do:

1. The software should support additional story types (that don't necesssarily exist as modules)
2. The admin can pick names, labels, weights for the story types.
3. Authors should be able to select the story type when entering content. This can be modified later on.
4. The admin should be able to organize the stories by type in the layout of the home page (and for taxonomy-restricted pages).

I have implemented a prototype here in the Civilities website, and have demonstrated #4 throughout. Here's how: in the node_page() and taxonomy_page() functions, I have created the

layoutStoryType_render_nodes(queryresulthandle) function.