Advice wanted please

[ThevBNinja]

Hello there,

regarding to your requirements

1. A main website landing page with articles; tools & resources; recent forum & blog posts - plus advertising.

2. A community forum (existing) and blog (new).


I myself highly recommended you to the last option which is

3. Purchase vB 4 Publishing Suite and utilise their CMS for the homepage and blog.

Since vbulletin is the most popular board software in the world, you have the benefit of free mods, and styles directly from vbulletin.org included support from members and the authors here. As Im working with forum software for years, none of these current others have such a large of free mods and styles as vbulletin. Also developer is going to port/release their mod for vbulletin 4 then upgrade is a smart choice atm.

As your requirement is looking for a simple CMS (as described) and blog. The default core-features of vbulletin CMS and Blogs should fulfilled your request without any problem.

The CMS is nothing fancy compare to joomla or wordpress but at least it works the way it was made for.

However buying a suite with CMS, Forum and Blog, will save you money and time, even when hiring someone to work with as it was the same system with linked features.

Like sharing members between CMS/Blog/Forums, linked profiles, comment, a bridge would take you age and ton of money to do that, not counting it's stable or not.

You can also made custom theme and custom mod to fit your site's goal and at this point, I think vbulletin suite is the most value option for your company.

Regards,
ThevBNinja