spidering and templates

[I, Brian]

Hi all -

I figure this is the right area to ask.

I have two YaBB SE forums but am looknig to buy licenses to run both on vBulletins.

Two concerns of mine are as follows:

1/ How easy is it to modify the template if you only know how to HTML?

YaBB SE is easy to modify - a simple file named "template.php" which is simply a HTML file in a PHP statement.

I'd like to be able to just make simple modifications to the vBulletin forums so that

a) they fit with whatever general site template layout I may be using, and

b) I can move from the faily plain looking original look to something not flashy but slightly personalised, with a couple of slight modifications.

Any comments on how user friendly the template system will be for non-coders (yes - we exist, you know!).

2/ The entire reason I'm looking to move from YaBb SE is because they simply are not indexed by search engines. And I'm crazy about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) these days. Simply having a forum that can be spidered could be an immense long-term help for my fledgling communities.

vBulletin is the only one that promises an official converter for 1.5.4, plus I nkow vBulletin has *a lot* of bells and whistles.

I'm curious if someone could point me to any list that shows what hacks vb3 will have pre-installed.

I'd also very much appreciate any comment on expected movement of hacks from 2.x to 3.x - for example, will they be utterly incompatible? Will they only require slight modification? Will an entire new generation of hacks be required? etc

(filburt's Google hack looks great so far...worth keeping an eye on that one. Btw - Hi filbert - never even knew you were part of vbulletin.org )



Anyway, that's maybe too long a post. Any comments - links to other threads covering the same topics, even - are very much appreciated.

Brian