Can vbulletin improve my site?

[slobizman]

I have a simple, but nice looking web site called AltEnergyToday.com/. It's a simple script I had written, reads and displays news feeds, and does pretty well in Adsense revenue. No maintenance whatsoever.

So, now I'm thinking of making my life more complicated .

What the site is missing of course is any interactivity. So, I was thinking about creating a vbulletin site out of it, now that I see it has a feature called the RSS Feed Posting Robot (does it do Atom too?).

I was thinking I could create a VB site, use the RSS Robot to put the feeds into topic starters and let the users then comment on the articles that are posted.

I'm not up on VB yet, so I'm running this by you all to see if it's something that will actually work well.

I don't want the home page to be the forum display though. I'd like a home page that displays the latest news postings that the RSS Robot grabbed. Do I need to get a portal like VBAdvanced for this? If I do, can I just show the topic starting posts, or will it show the replies too?

Anyway, by looking at by current site, you kind of get the idea of what I'm trying to accomplish--I want them to see the latest news on the home page. But with VB, they could click on those topics to comment. Or of course go right into the forum.

Do you all think this is a good idea? Worth the effort? Can it be done in a way that still delivers the news like it does now?

Any suggestions on what I'll need to do, or what else I should do, are appreciated!!

Oh, and I should be clear, it does not have to look like my site now. So, any suggestions on a theme that would work well for this subject matter and what I need?

Is there a good forum on which to ask questions like this? I cannot post on vbulletin.com forums (other than presales area) since I'm not yet an license owner. But I'd like to get opinions on some things before I go forward. Any other vbulletin forumns?

[Marco van Herwaarden]

First of all posting in the Pre-Sales at vbulletin.com is a good idea.

All you are mentioning could be done with vBulletin. Since members can reply to topics it will add the interactivity.

vBulletin can not only import RSS feeds (using the RSS Poster Robot), but also suports exporting as RSS. You could simply use the RSS feed from vBulletin to post on your homepage.