Can I create an attractive, styled blog-like front end?

[slobizman]

I've been looking at Wordpress themes trying to find the best way to do a site where I let people post opinion articles (about the town we live in) and let other people post comments on them.

Then I thought, wait! What about using Vbulletin, its blogging function, and maybe Vbulletin (don't know if I nned this, I've never used Vbulletin)?

But I have some questions:

1) The forum "look" is too techy and I don't think will work. I need the front end to look more blog-like or news article-like. Just how closely can I achieve this look?) I understand once a user gets past the front end and into the forum, it will look like a forum), I'm looking for a very clean yet styled look.

2) Is there a way I can set user roles up so that until I approve of people as trusted writers, that I can approve articles prior to their posting?

3) When articles are shown on the home page in the blog article format, can I set it up to show excperts only rather than the full article?

Please note that I do not want to do any hacks to the code, just addon's and a theme. I have run a forum before and the hacks just too much to handle for me.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

It might help if you could link to a site that shows what you mean with "blog-look". Not everyone might have the same idea with that phrase.

[cheat-master30]

You can theoretically set up a blog like front end, either with custom coding, an integrated CMS or vB Advanced, and the vBulletin template system and Style Manager is advanced enough to edit the layout to that of a typical blog. And from what I know of add ons built on the vBulletin code, they use a set forum to get the news posts from, so you'd use the Usergroup Permissions to dictate who could post and reply in that forum which would dictate who would post news and comment on it.