tweak,

it's a portal in the sense of providing you with a front page that displays interesting information from the forums, as well as pulling information from a specific news forum. if you take a look at the demo site you can see how this can be expanded/extended into a nice front-end to your forums.

it is intended as a simple alternative to vbportal or nuke2vb, both of which may be too feature-rich for some people's requirements.

as far as the 'menu' you mentioned, the only one i am aware of on the demo site is the 'slide-in' menu that is implemented in DHTML. if there is enough of an interest in it, i might clean it up and make a nice installation instruction to show how to integrate it into vb (as it is completely dynamic, in that it builds menus depending on what usergroup the member is).