[Toucan42]

I am looking at starting a new site and am looking for suggestions on what to implement for the platform. I have experience with vB and would love to continue using it, but my new site has needs beyond what I am familiar with so here goes:

My new site will need multiple blogs. I intend to use the vB Blog for this as it is seemless with the vB product.

My new site will need paid-for-inclusion link directories that I can pull from and display categories in blocks. Example - say the site is about fruit (it isn't really, though) then in the forum category for oranges I will want to be able to display a block of featured links from the orange category. This exposes the need for two features: link directory (handling pay for inclusion) and something along the lines of CMPS.

Can anyone suggest a link directory? phpLD would be best, but how well does this integrate with vB? The vBAdvanced link directory won't handle pay for inclusion (grrrr) and I can't find another mod or hack to do this. Any suggestions here?

My new site will need to allow for pages which are not forum pages, but more along the lines of articles. GARS looks promisiong, but at 70 dollars (after exchange rate) it's pretty steep. Anyone recommend a hack for handling article (or non-forum) pages that can be carried in CMPS?

Any alternatives to CMPS I should look into?

My original inclination was to go with Drupal or some other CMS, but I would prefer to remain with what I know for the most part.

Any help lining up the platform choices would be MOST appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[Moelman]

Hmm, well I have never used a link directory on my site but the only products I know about are the two you mentioned. I'm not sure of your budget but you could seek out a coder to integrate phpLD into vB.

Does GARS still release the lite version of GARS? I remember that used to be free but you could only use it on one individual forum. I don't think there are really many other products like GARS out there.

And I don't really know what to tell you for a cms either, the only ones I know that integrate with vB are vBAdvanced and vBDrupal.

Sorry I couldn't be more help but I guess I just don't have experience with most of what you need to use.