Is it possible to mod vB5?

[fenderbob]

Hi everybody,

I have what I feel is an amazing forum right now. Everything is set up exactly the way I want it. I should mention that it's a brand new forum running vB5 (meaning I'm not coming from vB4).

Having said all that, there are several features I'd like to add to my site to make it truly personalized and custom and dissimilar from other forums out there, to give my visitors a unique and fun experience...and a reason to keep coming back.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about php. So any mods I make to my site, I would need to pay someone to do them for me.

I actually reached out to a developer about a year ago about this and ran some of my ideas by them. They told me that they could do the mods for me, but then I'd forever be trapped in the vB5 version I was using at the time the mod is implemented. In other words, I could never upgrade after modding my site. This is obviously far from ideal.

Is this still true?

What about the hooks system? I get the feeling that the hooks system is used for the purpose of modding a site.

Anyway, this whole thing is totally out of my realm of experience, but it's something I want to explore. There are several things I want my site to do that it currently doesn't do now--and I don't expect vBulletin to ever implement some of these features that I want. Could someone please give me advice?