Best Practice for my needs?
 

Hi all,

in want to start a Forum, and to decide
which one was quite easy. :)
But there are a lot of questions wont let
me sleep. And after three days searching
the web i get confused and hope you can
help me out.

In my dreams, i have a homepage with
sections: news, interviews, articles, reviews,
a release database ect. (The Topic of the
Page will be Audiobooks)
I create the content and present it to the
readers.
The readers should have the possibility to
share their thoughts, reviews and comments
on this content with each other in the vBulletin Board!
So to say, all feedback to the content should
be concentrated in the Board.

I have no knowledge in PHP or html, that
means i need a cms thats divide the content
from the layout of the site. I would like to go
with Mambo, untill Jelsoft finished his CMS
in 2009 because Mambo has the layout templates
that comes closest to my vision of the finished site.
I realized that there is no good and finished
integration between mambo an vB (theres a
lot of complains about the connector from
bbpixel) and i dont know how much integration
i really need.

Where should i store the content? In vB or
Mambo?
I dont need that the users can login to vB
through mambo (snyc DB), because they
should not interact with mambo, just with vB.
What do i need to give the users the possibility
to place comments to a news in the Board.
Simple to implement and simple for the Users.
(Like on this site, the comments begin in the
middle of the site)
One integration is important, either i can post
a news in vB and it appears in mambo as news,
or i create a news in mambo and automaticaly
a thread in vB will be created.

I think that are the most important questions.
I unbosom my heart to you so i hope you can
help me get back on track. :)

Kind Regards
Nero

Theres just no one right way of doing this. Alot of it will depend on your preferences and what your looking to get out of it.

That said, I'll point out some vb hacks that may help you along your way.

vbadvanced cmps is a good place to start.

The news module pulls your posts from a designated forum and lets your members comment.

You can also create your own vb powered pages which might be ideal for static content like interviews.

Articles and Reviews are mostly the same thing. Check out the Geeks article hack here on vb.org and Cinq is releasing one at his site www.vbarticles.com sometime soon as well. The former has modules available for cmps for you to display the latest reviews/articles and show the contents of a random or featured article.

Your release database will be custom. Not sure if there are other readilly available scripts out there for this but it shouldn't be hard to do if your familiar with php.

Thank you for your reply. Why do all vBadvanced Site look the same but the colors? Is it a hell of a work to style it or is it very limited in customizing?