dailygrind

Excellent domain and the website also looks nice. Can you give us some background about the technology used?

The subject being discussed makes some difference though. A search functionality in a programming related forum is fundamental, while it probably isn't in a music one for example.

I've been running a music forum since 2001 (millions of posts) and I'm not sure an implementation of this type would suit... but these are all good concepts overall.

PHP if you are on a shared hosting environment, otherwise Ruby.

it might be some swfsheet (http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=2948) type of software. Having that sprite (what a design!!!), you can animate it with jquery easily...