Advice on non-forum page handling - articles, directories, etc

[toucan42]

Hi all,

I am looking for advice on how other folks handle non-forum pages for their sites. I am interested in starting a new site where forums are only a portion of the site. I will want the ability to add articles and other non-forum content as well as adding a directory to the site. I am curious what others have done to manage these kinds of things.

Is vbAdvanced the way to go? Other alternatives? Open to all suggestions. Not so interested in picking up Drupal or other CMS if I can avoid it since I have experience with vB.

[lstintxs100]

I have just started using vbdynamics for some of my articles and reveiws. I am a bad author but the presentation is pretty much what I was looking for.

http://copiertalk.com/articles/browsecategory.php?c=3

It should be open to guests so you can poke around if you would like.

[toucan42]

this still presents things in a very vB sort of way. I guess what I am after is using vB as a forum (duh!) plus vB Blog as a blog platform using the usergroup permissions to allow only certain users to blog. But I want to add pages to my site that wont have the vB look and feel aside form the header and footer. I want to manage articles, directpries (free and pay for inclusion) and i want to manage a home page which will feature a selection of all these.

I suspect there might be a good mod or product available - I would prefer to manage everythign through a vB admin backend so although the forums may not appear to be the main thrust of the site it would in fact be the vB templating engine at work. Any other suggestions?