[fel64]

– You’d want to use forum_name( $topic->forum_id ).

– I think so. If you look at the code you’ll see an array of posts, and by using array_shift() you can detach the first one and have some special template code just for that. Be sure to check it’s the first post of the topic, though, not just the first post of the page. Maybe a better thing to do would be to add a class to each post giving it a topic-specific number, so you can style topic-post-1 or whatever individually.

– Where in your template I assume it says topic_posts(), replace that with echo( get_topic_posts() - 1 );