I have a confession to make: I have never played a druid. So I have no clue what I would do to get a decently optimised druid. Anyone have any sample builds, preferably melee oriented?
Druids are pretty easy: Druid 20 basically wins everything. However, being a Shifter lets you take the Moonspeaker PrC from Races of Eberron. It will, at the cost of some Wild Shaping levels, improve your Druid's summoning, grants you some energy resistance, gets you more shifter traits, gets your shifter trait bonuses to be permanent... lots of good stuff. It might be worth a look, just so you understand the full extent of the tradeoffs. You don't lose BaB or spellcasting levels (versus straight Druid), which is nice, but it's not going to benefit your melee, except as it affects the physical attribute bonus from your shifter trait. And assuming you are melee-ing in wild shape form, it will hurt somewhat.
If you really want to do melee, you will probably want to take the Razorclaw, Longtooth, or Gorebrute traits, as they increase your Strength score, even when wild shaped. I'd also look into the Beast Spirit ACF, whereby you get, for the cost of an Animal Companion: some feats, improve your summons, and can add to one ability score a day to a degree related to your class level. Choosing Strength here, again, would help with melee. The level 4 ACF is ok, the level 5 one is, IMO, suspect. Wild shape is pretty fun, right?
And, of course, the Druid spell list has some physical buffs for you as well. As does, if you want to lose some spellcasting, the Warshaper PrC: better natural weapon damage, higher Str and Con, and crit immunity from a couple levels. As always, passing up spellcasting levels is a tough tradeoff, but if you want melee, you can find plenty of classes that can help with melee at the expense of spellcasting (weretouched master, bloodclaw master from ToB, etc.).
So, straight Druid would probably look something like:
Razorclaw Shifter
Druid 20
Wis > Con > Str > Dex > Int > Cha
Druid 1 (Beast Spirit ACF): Healing Factor (Wolverine-y, for survivability), or maybe Razorclaw Elite for full attacks when charging (not that big a deal at first level, but it preps you for later). Take both with a flaw.
Druid 2
Druid 3: Extra Shifter Trait if you took the two shifter feats at level 1, or the one you didn't otherwise. Beasthide will help your AC. Dreamsight with give you speak with animals while shifting, and access to Dreamsight Elite later for seeing invisible critters
Druid 4
Druid 5:
Druid 6: Natural Spell. Because you're a Druid
Druid 7-20: Improved Natural Attack at level 9, and then Dreamsight Elite and whatever combat feats best fit your style (TWF-tree, Power Attack...)
So, at the end, you have 9th level spells, you're getting +6 to any physical trait (and you can change this during the day), You're wildshaping into something pretty big and bad and getting more physical bonuses to that form when you shift. Your other option is to take a dip into Warshaper around level 9 (1 level for morphic weaponry for increased claw damage, 2 levels to get morphic body and physical attribute bonuses). You'd still get a couple of 9th level spells per day that you can cast while you're wildshaped into a Dragonhawk with claws doing damage as if you were gargantuan... I'd say you'd be okay some melee.
