[doob]

You don't have to use includes, nor do you have to use the vb plugin system to make your forums look the same as your wordpress blog. You can alternatively hard code the navbar for your wordpress, and then also harcode the navbar for your forums. However, doing it that way means that if you cange the navbar for your worpress, you'll need to also change it seperately in your forums. Its easier to just have one version of the navbar that you reference into (include into) each of your platforms.

You also don't need to use the plugin system in vb to do any of this. You can just edit the navbar template in VB directly..i.e. hardcode how you want your navbar to look in your forums into the navbar template.

By the same logic you can either maintain 2 different sets of sidebars for each platform, again, its just easier to have 1 version to maintain and then reference them into each platform.

Using the vb plugin system allows you to reference an external file that you can then setup and edit in dreamweaver (or whatever), and upload new changes to without going into the vb admin interface and uploading a new hardcoded version each time you have a minor change. But you don't have to do it that way. For my workflow, I have a navbar file in dreamweaver that I can edit and upload changes to the server and then that is included into the forums template. So I can make changes without ever having to log into the vb interface.

Adding a sidebar in vb 3.x i found to be a bit tricky. You need to edit every template in vb (pretty much) to add in some code to create your columns. Many of the vb templates have to be at least a certain width to accomodate the form elements. i.e. the registration template.

There's plugin out there on this site, like vbadvanced, that seem to support columns, but those plugins also seem to very version specific, so updating your installation version can break them, and becuase you didn't code them yourself, there's no easy way to get them working again. Plus there's no real support for them since they're not part of the default vb install.

I'd suggest first take a look online for 2 column DIV tutorials where they have a navbar 2 columns and a footer using DIVs. Then take a look at how to accomplish php includes. That will help you understand how wordpress is laying stuff out and how you can edit your wordpress to use your own custom navbar, sidebar and footer content, each in its own div.

Last you'll need to rewrite any of VB templates that represent areas of the forums that you want to have the multiple columns. There are a lot of templates! Think about it. Alubmns, settings, registration, messages, blog, posts, threads, homepage, calendar, groups, etc. etc. I don't know of an easy way to just make a sidebar magically appear in every section of the forums. In my case I'm adding the sidebar to different sections one by one...

Anyway. Hope this helps.