[Simplicity]

Hi bhxtyrant,

To answer your questions. There is a plugin which allows you to call posts from specified forums and display them on your site. Also, you can create news articles via the News plugin within Subdreamer and have them posted into a specified forum aswell as onto your frontpage etc..

The News system itself is quite good, allowing you to postpone a created article so that it isnt viewable until the date that you set. Likewise you can also set a date from which it will stop being displayed. A WYSIWYG does come as standard with the ability to import html code. You can also have the news plugin viewable on multiple categories but assign a article to one, several or all of those categories.

Other things to note is that its vbulletin integration is perfect, allowing you to import usergroups from vbulletin and create new usergroups. Usergroup permissions can be set up for both plugins and categories, so you may have a subscribed usergroup in vbulletin that can have access to a 'members area' on your site that no other users can access. Likewise you could use the download manager and only allow registered members to have access to downloads (also a paypal plugin available to sell downloadable items).

The Lite version is free and if you only require a couple of plugins, it is possible to purchase them for Lite and not need to spend the full amount that its costs for the Pro version.

As for skins, subdreamer can skin your forum, by means of placing the header, footer and background on the forum pages. There is also a custom skin called superskin which will infact skin your subdreamer pages to reflect a forum skin (handy if you already like how your forum looks).

Its extremely customisable, skins and plugins are easy to develop (depending on your web coding knowledge).

Another plugin to note is the Supportdesk which enables users to submit tickets that you or your moderators can handle. Its quite basic at the moment, with custom fields having to be created manually in both the files and database. But it will evolve during development.

The best thing to do is download the lite version or use the online demo to see if it fills your needs.

If you need any more info just shout or ask on the subdreamer forums.