[Zachery]

1) Yes, you can, you can use vBulletin to manage your whole website with abit of work. For the searching bit, im not sure how it could be done, but im sure that with enough effort it could be done
2) Yes, as long as its tied into vBulletin you can most likly do this, vBulletin has a subscription system setup. Yes, they get moved back out after the subscription ends.

Most of the portals can be changed, and are all template based, so its totaly up to you how you want to make them look, the 3 collum format is just the default