I am new to Umbraco, and still evaluating it as a possible solution for the redesign of a public website I am working on.  I think I have a decent handle on how to create a custom document type and a template to display the data stored in the new document type, however it seems like the default interface for editing in the Back Office (the content tree) could be hard to work with in some instances, and I am wondering how difficult it is to make a custom editor.  Tree controls are nice for organizing hierarchical containers, but not for large numbers of items at a single level in the tree.

For instance, consider a hypothetical custom document type of "news article," where the user interface is a single page on the site with a form to search by various fields (publish date, category, title, author, etc).  Once a large number of articles have been added to the site, it would be cumbersome for an admin user to find an existing article if they are all stored in a single node of the content tree.  And the problem with organizing them in a tree, is that the tree can only represent a single means of categorization.  Instead, it would be preferable to provide the same search form functionality built for the front end, and allow the admin user to search on any of the fields associated with the document type. 

So the admin user would click on a top level "articles" node, and be presented with a search form in the right hand pane, that they would use to find the article they want to edit.  From there they would select an article, and be taken to the standard Umbraco tabbed editor that is associated with the document type. 

1) How diffiicult is it to do this?

2) Can anyone provide an example of a package where something similar has been done?

3) Is there another more "Umbraco" way of accomplishing the same thing? 

Thanks, DanO