[mccollin]

I will contribute my $0.02 here. I have been a long time user of GARS together with vBadvanced. Together with an unsupported connector available at the GARS site, you can do a lot of cool stuff with this setup, and create some custom content types. The biggest complaint people raise is no timed release of content, but this can be worked around by having staging forums that allow you to work on content before its moved to the production forums. But a few months ago GARS fell unsupported so I started looking for another direction (thankfully, GARS now has a new owner and should be fully supported as a commercial product again). I am liking vbDrupal a lot. In the great comparison by Michal Morris, he questioned its compatibility with Drupal modules and I don't think this is an issue. I have loaded a lot of custom modules in my testing, and thus far had no problems. Based on their website, the difference between Drupal and vbDrupal is very minimal and shouldn't be a problem for most modules. Here are some things that may not be evident from the high level search...

vbDrupal is complex, but at the same time its not really that hard to get going given some of the great video tutorials that are out there. Very few books on it though. When you are looking for help, look for Drupal stuff, not vbDrual as most of it applies. What vBDrupal gives you that is additional to Drupal is the following:

- Integration of user administration. It pulls all users from vBulletin into vbDrupal and uses vBulletins user adminstration going forward. If you register or login, you are always doing it in vBulletin, regardless of which side you do it on. I haven't tried it yet, cut supposedly this extends to vBulletin groups being able to be used for vbDrupal permissions and such... very powerful, and "safe" to the vBulletin person going in.

- Addition of vBulletin blocks in vbDrupal. You get blocks that let you show your latest threads and I believe even whole forums in vbDrupal.

- Ability to show vbDrupal blocks in vBulletin. I haven't tried this yet, but you can have your blocks from vbDrupal go back onto the vBulletin side as well. This means you can have a consistent look and feel on forum pages and non-forum pages.

- Adoption of vBulletin style into vbDrupal. This one I completely missed, but when you install this, it actually lets you use your vBulletin style in vbDrupal. This is a complete departure from the vbDrupal themes, and I've not completely figured this one out yet. You can still select other standard Drupal themes if you want, but you can also have it use your vBulletin style... and I believe you can modify it in vBulletin templates. I need to sort that out, because I am not sure if I want to stay with that or just go with a standard Drupal theme. I think you may give up some things like breadcrumbs over to vBulletin if you don't use the vbDrupal vBulletin style. Bottom line, is that out of the box you can get a site with vbDrupal that looks similar to a vBadvanced type site.

The biggest drawback with any of these approaches is that your content is now split... you can't do a single search of forum and non-forum articles. With GARS, you can. But with vbDrupal, you gain a world of capability because you can build just about anything with it and have to write very little code to do it.