Deciding on a CMS

[patriotcow]

Go custom imo or get evo articles: http://www.quacked.co.uk/evo-articles/

[eXaulz]

I've tried subdreamer a little, it wasnt that good. Not worth buying anyway.

The free options like Mambo or Joomla! are better, im my opinion.

Same here. ezDatabase sounds amazing, but hell no I'm not shelling out $50.00 for that. If I reeallly wanted something exactly how I want it, I'll code my own.

I'm going to use Joomla and vBridge. Weeeeeeeeee.

[databaseninja]

Joomla and vbridge

I just purchased vBulletin because (IMO) it's the best forum software for sites that may grow and since I don't know how large my site may become (high hopes) I figured I'd just dive in and not worry about the future.

However, I really like using Joomla as a CMS for a lot of smaller sites I've worked with. Mainly used for not-for-profits who actually didn't want a forums section but did want easy content management.

I'm fairly technical in the database realm (SQL Server) and can figure things out but am a complete novice in PHP, MySQL and have really focused on database topics... so I no longer really consider myself a 'coder'. So I basically want to use/purchase components and plug them together.

I've looked at vbAdvanced and... well... in my one hour of reading about it it looks great for integration with vBulletin but the style (and the out of the box style of vBulletin itself) is really dull. I'm sure with knowledge and creatively you can make some great sites but I'm not the person to do that. Joomla/Mambo have a whole cottage industry of people creating components, templates, etc. So that's what I like.

So I'm trying to create a community web site. I want robust forums and hopefully that will be the most popular area so I picked vBulletin. But I also want a nice home page and 'sections' along the top for 'Local Sports', 'School System', 'Town Hall', 'Classified Ads', 'Directory', 'Web Links', etc. I also want to use banner modules that allow me to specify a number of views a banner will get, be able to expire content based on a schedule, etc. I already have some experience and some very nice components for Joomla for this.

So the key for me is integrating the two at the user level for authentication... so a person only has to log in once to either a Joomla section or a vBulletin section. vBridge, from what I'm reading, seems painful but there seems to be some people really working on it.

Is it stable? I don't have the patience to hack a ton of code but can follow clear direction.

I am also open to using something else besides Joomla that integrates well with vBulletin. But I want the built-in components and not have to do a lot of coding.

Thanks for any feedback,

Don