[thebigboss]

I don't think you will get many answers about vbportal here as most vbportal users post at vbportal dot com

vbportal has an average 100 users online a day. there are reviews, links, content, special sections, encyclopaedia, FAQs, Ephemerids, Side blocks, Center blocks (each module can have different side and center blocks and there is about 50 blocks), Rotating banners with clickthru tracking, a newsletter, Polls, lots of statistics and they (all the modules) can have permissions and options. There's also a menu builder that you can setup which groups see each item and system messages that can also be targetted at specific usergroups (you setup a message or add a menu item and tick which groups have access to it). You can also quickly add any number of new pages, that are made up of any combination of blocks. This means you can have a different looking home page for each usergroup. what's more, each module (links, reviews, etc) can use a different template set.

The number of queries each page uses would depend on how many blocks you have toggled on (mainly). The vbportal dot com home page takes 24 querys when loggedin as an administrator and 20 for guests, but there's a lot of information being displayed. On the other hand, the Recommend Us and Newsletter modules for instance, uses just just 12 querys. It can change if you add more blocks. Not all blocks add querys to every page. Some blocks, such as external syndication (RSS/XML newsfeeds) can be cached for a 'period' of time.

The Recommend Us page would use more querys if more blocks where toggled on, but also less if less blocks are toggled on. The actual content of the Recommend_Us page doesn't use any querys itself. If you only wanted a header and footer (not sides or center blocks), then there's 6 querys.
The vbportal home page at vbportal dot com has banners, a side menu (with usergroup menu items - different groups see different menu items), system messages (again different to each usergroup), the top news storys (a center block, that can be toggled on any other module, as can all side and/or center blocks. if no side blocks are toggled on - either left or right, the modules content fills the page. if only the left or right column has blocks toggled on a module, then the modules own content, fills the left or right of the page accordingly). there's a mini stats block, a calendar, a poll, latest threads from the forums (these can all be side blocks too - as well as center blocks - and on the same page if you wanted), there's also a rotating banner block, there's a newsfeed thats pulled from another site, there's also a recent Content (pulled from the Content module) and a recent articles block pulling the latest Special Articles added. drop a block or two and the number of querys drops to, add blocks to a page and the querys for that page add up to, but you don't need to put all your blocks on one page. Of course, that's vbportal dot com's homepage and the way its layed out. You can even have your own index.php (maybe with a flash intro) that has links to your content management (and portal) or forums, as well as photopost, reviewpost and most of the other hacks and addons. There's no vbulletin files to edit (as of this date) and the install adds 2 indexs to vbulletin's tables structure. all the other tables are added, so upgrading vbulletin isn't so painful as previous versions and there's only 4 of vbulletin's original templates changed.