Lots of questions - Potential move from heavily hacked phpBB2

[mccollin]

Right... I've seen the demo. I'm more interested in the APIs. Can you give me some idea what kinds of APIs are there, and how they could be used... for example are their APIs that let you write a portal page and pull your content easily out of the VB database.

Example.

I want to create a forum for "Reviews". I would like to create a portal page to display the reviews that is asthetically pleasing and doesn't look like a forum. I just did one of these here... http://pdaphonehome.com/phpBB2/articleview.php?t=2940

This is a work in progress, so no comments on the creative side... still need to put buttons in and such..

Anyway, to do this page, I took the phpBB viewtopic.php and viewtopic_body.tpl and modified them. The php file only needed a minor change to alter the template file name and add a few variables and such... mostily it's the normal viewtopic script. The template files in phpBB are mostly html with dynamic data tags that take a while to figure out, but are easy to manipulate once you know how. I completely ripped apart the template and stripped it down to just the author, date, subject, and body... plus a few links, then I added left and right margins that are standard in the portal, and changed the create look... all done from scratch, but still using the CSS for the style.

But here's my problem with this approach... I've got probably a hundred or more pages done like this. I need to upgrade phpBB, so guess what. I've got to essentially redo all these pages.

The idea of an API appeals to me. Would the API let me create a custom page that pulls the data I've talked about here... and keep myself clean on upgrades? Does it give you a standard shell php file that handles all the session stuff to get you into, and out of a page, identify you have access, etc.?

I'm just trying to understand the process required to do custom pages, without having access to the code. I'm essentially wanting to us VB as a big content management engine.