forum topic list show a teaser of content

Hi,

I'd like to show teasers of my forum topic content types just like I do with posts that are promoted to the front page. The forum posts would still be organized in forums, just not presented in a table of titles. I've been working a lot with the forum-topic-list.tpl.php file, and I've been able to convert most of my forum topic list to divs instead of tables, but I don't see any way to include a teaser of a forum topic. Any php variables or other methods that may be helpful? Maybe the Views module?

Thanks,
Andrew G