What hack(s) do I need?
 

I'm not sure if this is the correct section to post this but here goes.

My name is Danny and I am an Administrator at the Pulsar Group of Australia website and forums. (http://www.pulsar.org.au/ and http://forum.pulsar.org.au).

I am not very skilled when it comes to this kind of thing but I do have a bit of basic html and web-design knowledge.

Ultimately I am trying to comebine our site and the forum so there is a seemless connection between them. I have looked at the Portal hacks available here but I am not sure what would best suit my needs.

If our site was just a simple news page/front page to the forums it would be much easier because I could just use any of the Portals, but unfortunately we have many other sections that are just as important. We already have a members section that enables forum members to upload pictures of their car. I then I have a link to their profile with a button at the bottom of each of their posts (next to the profile buttons etc). It is quite basic but works well enough (http://members.pulsar.org.au).

There are also the other parts of the site - Links, Specifications, Technical Articles etc. I understand that I can just keep these parts as static html/php pages but I ultimately would like to drive the whole site with vbulletin. I have found Article posting hacks that I could use for these parts, but integrating these into a Portal hack to keep the site looking uniform is well beyond me.

Sorry for the long post but I wanted to explain what I was trying to do. If anyone with more experience can help me it would be greatly appreciated! Also if there are any sites already doing what I want I'd love to see them too.

Thanks in advance,
Danny

First off, nice site you got going there Danny :)

Well, this is what i do for my site and i will try to relate to your site and your content.

I use my own hack vbArticles for all my articles, and you could too, to house the articles under :
Pulsar info : history , technical and specs.
Just create categories, its run off vBulletin and just link directly to the articles on your menu home.

I use vBhome (lite) for the portal front, and with a bit of hacking, can display the articles on the front page of the site.

For your links section, you can use vbLinksDirectory ( which is now in version 2 but a new version is supposedly out for beta testing ..soon ). It is integrated with vBulletin too.

Sponsors page, would be rather static i presume as not much changes there.

For your gallery section ( events ) , you can try the freeware Coppermine gallery, i believe it has integration with vBulletin as well ( i personally do not like gallery's layout ) or if you want a paid solution you can try Photopost.

For the rest of the static pages, just include vb's global into the file, should run the headers and footers nicely.

Cheers :up:

Thanks for your suggestions and advice - Lucky for me a friend with much more php and programming knowledge has offered to help out for the site, but he is fairly busy with work that he actually gets paid for so I might mess around with some of those hacks on a test site :)

What is the address of your site? I assume it's not the site listed in your profile information..

Cheers