[Chip Bennett]

@gerikg: I’m open to the idea. I played around with it a bit initially, but finally concluded that the forum was a totally different means of displaying information, and that the negative impact to the layout outweighed any perceived benefit of “consistency”.

With the blog and other sections, the left sidebar provides navigation within the section, which really isn’t applicable to the forum. Likewise, the right sidebar provides external links, which also aren’t applicable to the forum.

And, when I tried to put Views/Stats/Tags into a left sidebar on the forum, I just didn’t think that it fit very well (especially the tag cloud), and cramped the more important content (the forum and post lists themselves).

I could keep playing around with it, though…

@chandersbs: Thanks! Is it approaching something that others would find useful?