As I look at it, what I'm really trying to do is recreate the top page at multiple levels.
At the top, as we enter Moodle, we really have a course built around the social format. There is a news forum, and then any number of activities that I can add to the main menu. But this is really a category that can contain sub-categories and topics.
So what I want to do is have the same type of display for every (optionally?) category. At the category-level, have a social format course.
The problem, as I see it, is that the top-level course/category is kind of a hack. The top-level is always category zero, and there will always be only one course in category zero, so we can assume a lot. What if we added a new course format, such as "top". A course with that format type would be by definition, the top-level page for that category. We could assume that there would only ever be one top-level course for any category, and use the first one with the "top" format?
Thoughts?
mike