[karmanis]

Hello!

I am planning to built a news/discussions localized site with multiple categories and forums (similar to yahoo groups), and having looked at many board solutions I think the best way would be to go with VBulletin 2.3.0 + addons/hacks, planning to upgrade later to vb3+vbContent.

However I am not sure if VB+CMS/portal would be an ideal combination able to support all those I am thinking of. So I am asking for your advice before starting the whole project. What I am asking for is to find out if VB+something would be efficient for the following queries, and to determine this "something" I should go with.

1) I want my site to include an entry page which would include the last news (at the center) and last posts (at the left), from each board *category*. While I want the last category-posts to remain visible within the category-forums, I suppose that I am not looking for a portal (vbhome, vbportal) but for a cms, something similar to php-nuke/postnuke (or a hack to the board-wrapper). What would be your advice ?

2) While the whole site would consist of several non related groups (each having some content but mainly based on the group forum) I would like to add a simple html-content menu at the left of each group entry-page (for example: Group Downloads, Group News, Group links, Group Gallery, Group Forum). How could I achieve this result ? Maybe with a cms (phpnuke) that would trigger a different menu depending on the selected forum ???

3) I am planning to initially built some categories and filling them with "official" groups organized be my, and later on allow with some way the users to built their own groups. I know that it is easy to built their own forums, but is there also an easy way to automate the creation of the leftside menu for a new group ? This new group would consist of a new forum, a new gallery, a new downloads folder, and the leftside html-menu for the navigation in the group. Any ideas ?


Overall, do you think that I can built the main tasks of these steps using vb+cms or it is far more difficult and it should be based on custom php code ?


Thank you very much for any response !


karmanis.