I am trying to figure out how best to use ConTeXt for a project. Essentially I want to format postings on a message board for printing in a book, and provide multiple "tables of contents" for the postings (more information further down, and questions at the bottom). I'm sure that everything I want to do can be done with ConTeXt, but I'm a ConTeXt beginner, and it looks as if there's a lot of complexity to do this.

Each post has a title, an author, a date, and the text of the post. I'd like to arrange the information roughly like this:

       Title of the post
Author author  - Date date
--------------------------------------
Text of the post... text text text
text text text.

Then I'd like to create a "table of contents" that lists posting titles by date, like this:
January 1, 2008
 Title title title ........................ 10
 Another title .......................... 11
January 2, 2008
 Yet another title ..................... 12

Putting the author in there also might be nice, like this:
January 1, 2008
 Title title title (John Doe).......... 10
 Another title (Jane Doe)........... 11
January 2, 2008
 Yet another title (John Doe)..... 12

I'd also like to have a "table of contents" that lists posting titles by author, like this
Jane Doe
 A title ..................................... 14
 Another title .............................45
John Doe
 Title title title ............................ 35
 Another title .............................40

My questions:

1) How complex is this (for a beginner) to do in ConTeXt? I am very comfortable with Perl, so I thought I could write a Perl script to parse the posts and generate such tables of contents, with lots of \reference, \at, and \about commands. If this needs significant complexity to solve, I would prefer to handle the complexity with Perl, and keep the ConTeXt simple, so I can understand it.

2) Can I (ab)use the existing heading commands (\title, \subject, \setuphead, etc) to arrange and reference the title, author, and date? If so, can anyone provide a hint of how to do the headings and referencing? Will the existing heading commands let me reference the title, author, and date values for use in my "table of contents"? It looks as if I would have to create my own command that formatted the heading information how I wanted it, and set up the three references. I looked at "Alternative mechanisms" in the cont-eni.pdf, but that didn't seem to describe this type of flexibility.

3) If I can use the existing heading commands (question 2), can I also use the existing index and/or table of contents commands (\setuplist, \placecontent, etc)? And like  question 2, can anyone provide a hint of how to do it? It looked to me as if a lot of custom ConTeXt code would be necessary, and that I would have to build my own table of contents entry by entry.

Thank you very much,
Adrian