Concept for a wordpress template/content type "Index Page"

An Index Page (in this use case meaning a page at the top of a section of a website that acts as a "Table of Contents" for pages that are "children" to it.) Examples
could be a "Staff Team" page that displays a thumbnail photo and link to the staff detail pages below or a "Products" page that has child pages for "Shirts" "Pants"
and "Hats".
These are common scenarios in building websites and an automated way of building the pages would be a large improvement to the current manual methods.
Use Case

Header
1.
2.
3.
4.

5.

6.

7.
8.

User create a new page and choses "Index Page" from the
Template Types (Wordpress)
User enters Page Title and Content like they would any other page
(A&B)
If the user would like have content below the "Dynamic Index
Section (C) it is entered in a custom field (D)
If there are no pages are defined as children to the index page, no
content displays in section C. The dotted lines in this diagram are
meant to convey the conditional nature of the content within.
If there are children to the index page the Thumbnail, Page Title
and Page Excerpt are shown. (this may require the definition of
custom fields on that content type.)
Both the Page Thumb Image and Page Title should be links <a> to
the child page. For usability sake the sytem should also display a
"More link" after the excerpt to link to the page.
C
Page Thumbnails use site defaults for size
If thumbnails do not exist Page Title and excerpt float left. It is
anticipated that site builders would likely not have some pages with
thumbs.

Notes:
Do not have enough experience to understand performance/speed impacts
of building a page.
Assume this would need to be part of a theme framework such as the
wooframework/themes.
I know you could do something like this with Views and CCK in Drupal but
wonder if the Wordpress framework could do something like this in a more
approachable manner. Do not know enough about Joomla! to understand
how it might be implemented there.
Concept by Mike Hoefer @ //hoeferweb (v1.0)
mike@hoeferweb.com

A
B

Page Title <H1>

Page Body lLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
adipiscing elit. Mauris porta quam et nibh tristique
fermentum. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis
parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Nulla eget
molestie ipsum.
Page
Thumb

Page Title <H2>

Page
Thumb

Page Title <H2>

Page
Thumb

Page Title

Page Exerpt Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,

consectetur adipiscing elit. More...

Page Exerpt Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,

consectetur adipiscing elit. More...

Page Exerpt Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,

consectetur adipiscing elit. More...

Page Closing Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur

adipiscing elit. Mauris porta quam et nibh tristique
fermentum.

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