What is the Best Combination Forum Software / CMS Platform For Membership Site

We are about to embark on an ambitious project creating a membership site with many elements.

There will be both a paid and free membership. The site revenue will not be derived from Memberships and anyone will be able to look at most of the content on the website without being a member.

Niche is based around the outdoors.

While cost is a concern we have a modest budget for this of $5k-$10K

Here are the basics of the site. I appreciate any recommendations you can give in terms of what CMS / Forum platform to use. I have narrowed it down to a few and appreciate any feedback.

The essential elements this site will contain are the following:

• Forum
  • Integrate Social media Aspects (Pinterest, Facebook, Youtube)
  • Sign in via those Social media Sites to utilize their same info
• Blogs (USERS and Our Own)
  • Users sign in. (Both Forum and Blog)
    • Only one username and password
• News Feed - An aggregator along with our own created news.
• Classifieds
• Business Directory
• Videos (Guides, Reviews, How To’s)
  • Our Videos
  • Users Videos (Reward them for posting videos) They can upload videos directly onto our website as well as utilize Youtube.
    • Capabilities to share videos, embed, etc…
    • Reward them with
      • Gear
      • Monetary
      • Upgrade Status on Site

So far the CMS we are leaning towards is Drupal. From what I can tell and after talking with some programmers Drupal seems to be the most flexible. Because the Forum aspect is going to be a big and integral part of our website making sure to build the forum side of it is crucial. Drupal has a forum module but I am not sure if it will be powerful enough for what we need. Seems pretty basic.

The two Forum platforms that seem to be the most powerful and appealing are VBulletin, and Invision Power. Both seem that they can be integrated with Drupal as well.

So the question is, can we utilize just the Forum Platforms to achieve our goals, Drupal and it's Forum module, or a combination of Drupal and one of the Paid Forum Platforms?

Again I appreciate any insights or help with this.

Kyle

 

I think you shouldn't look at standard CMS like Drupal, Joomla, WP with open code if we're talking about really huge traffic. If website have to withstand really many visitors - it's better to build a website on ASP or framework Phyton. And there's no problem with forum - there are many such moduls.

 

Thanks for the reply. So far Drupal seems to be the way to go and we may be able to just utilize the Drupal Forum to get what we want out of it. Drupal seems to be the easiest to maintain and to expand. There is a great community surrounding it as well.

 

http://www.boonex.com/dolphin
It has everything that you need and even more

 

Thanks for the info about that. I have never heard of it. At first glance it looks a bit limited for my purposes. Essentially we do not want to be constrained by a system and ultimately Drupal seems to be the best fit for our project.

 

I would always go with WordPress, no matter what.

Anyhow, you may check the popular ones: http://mywebmasterlinks.com/#CMS-Software

 

You should work with something that work out of the box and it is mature. Be sure to have sufficient finance backup. Any kind of social project will require at least middle class VPS.
Good thoughts regarding using WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.

 

I have a site that,s membership free and paid.
I use Joomla

Membership = Membership Pro from joomdonation.com
Forums = Kunena from kunena.org
Business Directory = Mosets Tree from mosets.com

They all work well together

Plenty of classifieds and video stuff available for Joomla