Modifying the Drupal Book module wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but not as good as I’d hoped. I wanted a simple output of thumbnails from “pages” within the portfolio book, but since Book uses the menu system to maintain links rather than node relationships, I had to tinker around a little more than I’d hoped to. Fortunately, the table of contents for the book is placed inside a template_preprocess function, so it wasn’t that hard to override the book navigation function. Unfortunately, because Book uses menu system references, I had to putz around a bit to load the attached images for each link without incurring a full node_load since I already had the title and its nid. In any case, I did not, as they say, hack core, and now I can take advantage of Book’s outlining functions and hierarchal structure (which should be useful for details of pictures should I ever want to include any) for my portfolio page. Adding jQuery bits to the affair still has to be done, and that will be a little more involved, I think.
Right now, I realize how much I want a previous/next pager for my blog… (And that’ll be it for the day.)