wooooooooo.
very cool.
The reviews Tab feels like a native xenforo tab ... But I guess it is not. Are you using the xenforo editor ? Are you using the Zend framework like Xenforo ? Could you easily add a xenforo Comments thread ? or a Xenforo "Like" to your reviews ? Maybe you have your own
comments engine ? Could you get your review to show up in Xenforo's What's New ? Could you get xenforo avatars to appear in your comments ?
At the moment, my system is powered by a framework I've written myself (with 2 design goals: to deliver good performance and to minimize development overhead). I simply call it "page", but I'm sure I'll come up with a more creative name at some point. I once applied it to a school CMS development project and had the entire system up in two hours whereas my other classmates were struggling to get their products out within 2 weeks...I guess that shows that my design was at least somewhat on the right track
In any case, the framework as such it is able to connect to the xenforo database and use information from the forum (I've written a "xf_db" class for the purpose). It does not, however, hook into the xF code directly, as my framework conflicts with zend. That's a separate matter, though- I can probably re-work the namespaces, autoloaders, etc. in such a way that it does not.
As far as the remainder of your questions go, yes, all of those
would be possible. That's the beautiful of writing an application specifically for your web site! You'll notice that the homepage news cms already has its own commenting system which makes use of your xf account, so it's seamless to post there.
My goal is to at some point publicly release a CMS which a. easily integrates with a variety of forum software and b. makes it easy to create custom types of content. I'm not even close to being able to do this, but it's something I will be exploring over the course of the next 2-3 years. I will definitely be sharing it here if/when it becomes a reality.
I simply use tinymce as the review editor, which is the same as what xf uses, right? There's one catch: for privileged users, I allow the use of certain php calls in the text body, so that stuff like table of contents, ratings, and comparison boxes doesn't have to be manually coded up every time.