Feasibility of "Portal-like" Hack

[sdotson]

I have been running a phpBB site (http://www.sdotson.com/forums) and making modifications to it for some time now. I am considering a switch to VB but wanted to know if you guys thought this was possible.

I'd like to be able to post topics from the forum onto the front page. (A portal is what you need you'll say). Well not exactly.

Most of the portal (CMS) hacks I've seen for ALL forums takes the last X posts from an assigned category or categories. I'd like to be able to mark a thread as "news related". Then on the front page the items listed will be the last X number of these posts from any category that has this flag set.

Is this going to be too much of a load on the server having to index the entire board each time you load the page?

How about writing these out to a static file. When a new item is "checked" as a "news item" the static file is rewritten. Then a simple include on the index page will cause this page to be included.

Possible? Feasible? Already out there?

Thanks...