[MacaroniDuck]

Jedi, thank you for the thoughtful and useful feedback. It's especially good to hear that modifications beyond basic colors, etc. might not be particularly expensive if we go that route.

I perhaps should have clarified more in my original post. By "SubGroups" I meant what vBulletin appears to refer to as "Social Groups", not "user groups". We need our club members to be able to create unlimited social groups for the purposes of organizing and holding events (Think Meetup.com). So, we need people within each SubGroup to be able to create private or public events for that SubGroup (social group). I believe I've seen mods from a user called Farcaster that address these things as well as RSVP, etc.

By RSVP, I mean a way for people invited to an event to indicate whether they will be attending or not. Again, something not in vBulletin core, but available in a mod. This completely boggles me since the core of any local/regional social community is holding events/meetups. It seems like a lot of Internet Social Community developers are overlooking that their products might have a huge market in such groups or at least missing the strong need for this kind of functionality.

Are installing mods fairly straightforward? Or is that dependent on a given mods documentation? I see that most of them include instructions in the forums. Unfortunately, because I'm not a license holder I can't see specifically how detailed or complicated they are. The thing that concerns me most is that many of them appear to require that you go in and modify code yourself in order to get them working. Since vBulletin.com doesn't support mods and we don't have strong php skills, this is a dicey area for us. I take a bit of comfort in hearing from you that the support community here is strong and helpful, however.