[jasbell]

Hello.

I am migrating a 1000+ member online community to a private site. I know that I want to use the forum capability of vBulletin and integrate it with a CMS to provide other features that VB does not offer in a single sign-on manner. I want a consistent look and feel between the platforms so it looks like one site, and I probably will want to break up the VB menus across pages and menus in a way that is more convenient for the members. The site will be in Portuguese and will require UTF-8 encoding as well as translated menus.

Does anyone have any advice regarding which CMS would best integrate with vBulletin to manage an online community? My functional spec is attached, and any advice would be great.



Customizable profile

• Custom fields, values, and form field types
• Rearrangeable layout
• Provide html formattable area (textarea) for member to write something about themselves, include links, or use javascript or html to pull in external widgets or images
• Buddy/friend lists

Profile search

• Criteria by attribute values
• Resulting list of users can be reduced by clicking an ?x? next to any profile not interested in, selection/de-selection of profiles by check box. In the admin interface there should be the ability to take an action on selected (checked) members (like send message)

Forums

• containers can have associated images
• topics can have associated images
• posts/replies can have associated images and permits html formatting and images within any post
• Can be classified by users ?tagging? metadata
• Can be alternatively displayed/organized according to classification metadata or explicit placement and ordering under some title.
• Sortable by author name, author of last response, date created, date of last response
• Allows anonymous posting

Forum search

• Interpretive
• Results show Forum, Topic, thread brief, poster name/photo
• Resulting list of threads can be reduced by clicking an ?x? next to any on not of interested, selection/de-selection of profiles by check box. In the admin interface there should be the ability to take an action on selected (checked) posts (like remove)

Messaging

• Public commenting in other members profile area with notification and associated with commenter?s photo
• Private in-system message to other members
• Email blast to friends
• Admin blast of private messages and emails

Invitations

• Ability for members to invite friends
• Admin ability to track who invited whom, and view and manage outstanding invitations.
• Email invite status notification and recovery: rejected email alert etc.)

General

• Private walled community with access controls
• Allows real estate for advertising
• Stretchable site pages instead of fixed width
• Ability to create custom pages that contain html for purposes of widgets and mashups
• ?Abuse? button for members to help identify questionable content that is a candidate for deletion
• Support for UTF-8 in forms and on page display
• Portuguese menu translations or translatability
• Classifieds listings and management
• Catalog/store and capabilities (at least Integratable) for merchandising (selling hats, shirts, 3rd party products or services
• Delegated administration
• User tracking tools and reporting
• Ability to integrate poll/quiz widgets on pages
• Be able to completely brand site (colors, images, icons etc.)

Configurable authenticated homepage

• Change layout and reorder/re-organize
• Choose what content appears
• Group content in boxes

Group event scheduling and invitation

Administration

• Manage members
• Manage content
• Etc etc etc.

[echamberlain]

I don't think you will find a single solution to do everything you want, but there are a number of solutions that can be used together with vBulletin as the authentication backend.

Some of the other applications to check out are:
Joomla
phpFox
Zoints Local
PhotoPost Classified

We use UTF-8 encoding on our site and have integrated Joomla, WordPress, and vBulletin with a number of plug-ins, mods, and add-ons.

[jasbell]

Lets see how things go. I wanted to say away from integrating a totally separate app that where vBulletin was not the base

[echamberlain]

I hear that. Given the chance to do things over, I may not have chosen Joomla, but the bridge we use works .

My new site I am developing is vBulletin centric and much easier to work with.