Organization of Items for a mod

[Xzar]

I'm wondering what's the best way of organizing Items with a mod. Lets say I have several items that are similar to each other (for example: Stone/Iron/Gold/Diamond boots). Would it be best to create a class for each type of boot and have them extend an abstract Boot class, or create a Boot class some property, such as an enumerator that characterizes the type of boot. So far I have gone with the enumerator approach, but I'm concerned that a mod like Not Enough Items wouldn't pick up on the different kinds of Item.

 

I also have a secondary question; with a crafting recipe, I want to be able to use any type of Item that extends a certain abstract class. Kind of like how you can use any type of wood plank to make sticks, doors, etc. Not sure how to accomplish this, since the way you create a crafting recipe is you pass an object of the type of Item you want in the recipe, but you can't instantiate an abstract class. :3

[Xzar]

For the first question: It doesn't really matter. NEI doesn't care about Item classes, it cares about the Item objects in

Item.itemsList

.

How about just as an idiomatic way of things then?