Created the debate and debatecomment nodetypes, along with sundry htmlpages, an htmlcode, Everything Discussion Directory, etc.
It's a threaded discussion deal. A debate node is the root of the discussion, and debatecomment nodes are comments. At present, debate is readable by gods and content editors, and createable by gods. debatecomment is createable by either. That's the nodetype permissions: There is also a flag to limit read access to gods only. My next move will be to repurpose the flag field as a usergroup id, so, for example, edevsters will be able to have discussion nodes that only they can see, etc.
I've thought of whipping up a document type with a usergroup ID field, which would work the same way. Then again, is that really needed? It seems to me that most restricted_superdocs and edevdocs can and should be replaced by variously-restricted debate nodes. I'm tempted to add a "no more comments" field to debate and leave it at that.
I have some concern about the whole debate node deal. It's not what E2 is really about. We've striven like hell to discourage "response writeups". As far as these are used as support for our real "mission" here, they're a Good Thing: edev could really use 'em, for example. It's not so good to mix the metadata in with the data, so to speak, so it'd be nice to keep edev discussions out of e2nodes. e2nodes are just plain lousy for discussions anyway: That's not what they were designed for. These can also help cut down on the torrent of /msg traffic among the e2gods, content editors, and edev usergroups. Nevertheless, we need to keep an eye out for abuse, especially if we start allowing more users (edev, etc.) to create them.
We still need some usability tweaks with this. The "compact" displaytype should be the default, I believe.