I have a question.. the vbulletin solution would be perfect for forum based comunity.. how about a gallery based one with a detailed profile page, and forum (it doesnt have to be a super powerful one .. a light one will do) and can integrate a family tree/genealogy script (if this exist)
I know about WP MU.. but I highly doubt my family is the blogging type.. they like photos though! Tho a blog integrated to the above will be perfect.. some can use it.. some just use gallery...
The latest vBulletin does have a user gallery installed already, or you can install Joomla and Coppermine gallery together using a bridge if you want it to be free, and add Simple Machines Forum or Fireboard Forum to that if you want a forum. This Terry Pratchett Site is using Joomla with vBulletin integrated - just to complicate things a bit more. Edit: just to add this is the vBulletin album bit for one particular member: http://www.terrypratchettbooks.org/discworld/members/joculator-albums-random-snapshots.html and this is the Joomla album bit: http://www.terrypratchettbooks.org/octarine/ which has been there since before vBulletin had an album integrated as standard, so everyone now has two choices of places to upload photos etc.
all the stuff you can do with the bridge solution can be done with drupal. if you go for a bridge, you have to maintain, update, monitor the security of 2 systems. plus the bridge itself. and you have two admin interfaces. of course it works somehow. with drupal you can do all that plus so much more. one example: you can set up a self managed, paypal supportet banner advertising system. or you can sell blogposts for cash fully automated. i just developed a shopping cart system to sell unique serial numbers for games. just with drupal. i don't know any full feature shopping cart system that could do the same. maybe you don't need all this, but it's nice to have a content framework, that makes all this possible without running two scripts on the same website.
Yet another question: I'll give the members email addresses and is there a CMS solution that will cater to a login form and enable them to check their email?
I would also suggest drupal for any sort of a community site... I have integrated phpbb into my drupal based site (vb might be better but its not for me) ... blogs can be done with drupal, modules exist for other things like gallery etc. private messages is a built in feature in phpbb and there is also a drupal module.... I think that people get attracted to joomla because of their website which just looks better organized (I did too) in any case its not very hard to switch from one to the other (didn't take me too long to dump joomla and switch to drupal) so you might as well just pick one and switch if you don't find what you're looking for.... email addresses - I don't know about this one.
this is the drupal module I used - http://drupal.org/project/phpbb there is another one as well (same thing done differently) you can go to drupal website and search for phpbb .... there is a module to integrate vb as well.
I think vbDrupal module works for the integration. But I am not really convinced that the developer will continue doing upgrades of bridge in future.
All of these things can be done with WordPress, using a few plugins, a little customization of your code, and BBPress for forum. Buddy Press is definitely worth looking at imo. Seriously, check it out.
vBulletin and PhotoPost PHP Pro Gallery can share the same user database. I've just started using TNG (The Next Generation of genealogy sitebuilding), but there are no bridges to my preferred products like vBulletin or ExpressEngine yet. If you want to give SMF and TinyPortal a go, someone has managed to get them to run with TNG to a certain point. http://tngforum.us/index.php?showtopic=1425
I'm using Jooma and Community Builder. Click the link in my sig to check out the community and profiles. Some small tabs in the profiles aren't viewable to public, just logged in users though.
You might want to consider b2evolution, which is a Wordpress competitor. b2evolution is great if you have multiple blogs and multiple blog authors because the control panel was made for that scenario. I use Wordpress with vBulletin (forum). Drupal is also good, but takes a while to get to know. Joomla is another somewhat popular option, but I have heard it wasn't as good for SEO as Drupal or Wordpress.
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