Help me choose a blog mod
 

A partner and I are lanching an automotive blog this month, which will feature a forum as well. I want the two to be as fully integreated as possible.

What the best mod for this? I originally looked at Vblogetin, but a) I'm not crazy about paying an annual license fee for a hack, and b) looks like it is geared more for member blogs.

What we're really going to do is have staff writers contribute articles, not necessarily each in their own blog though. I guess what we really need is an integrated content/front page/article management system...sort of like a mix between vbarticles, vbadvanced cmps and wordpress.

Just looking at different products and trying to find something that is the best fit. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

you could try vBadvanced and just organize your articles as threads in an "articles" forum and then link to them from the front page/portal...?

just an idea - i don't even use vB. hell i just converted to vB about 2 weeks ago. :)

Chris, the annual fee is only to maintain access to upgrades, support, etc. You can continue to run the software afterwards.

Yeah, that was my original thought, and would be the most straight forward. The only thing is I want the articles to look like an article and not a post. Perhaps I can create a separate showthread just for the articles forum(s) that would make them look more like blog posts & comments.

I can't imagine using any vb related product w/o support or upgrades. Unless I never wanted to ugrade my vbulletin ever, I think I'd have to keep paying your fee.

It looks like GARS from thevbgeek.com does just about everything I'm looking for. Just export the posts in the article forum to a CMPS block on the home page and I'm done...

Will continue to research this...

you could use a CMS like drupal (the vb integration is here -> http://www.vbdrupal.com/) or an Articles mod, like the one MadeByMary (http://www.madebymary.com/index.php?page=vbarticles)

Yeah, I looked at Mary's but it doesn't appear from the demo to support comments.

it does support comments, but I think she's got the comments moderated. If you go to my site and click on Articles on the navbar, you should be able to create a comment on the 1 test article I have in there (the comment icon is the page with a pencil on it)....