I have a gaming site with a pretty popular forum. Currently I use minibb + wordpress as forum + cms combination, but the mods has said that they'd like a different forum, suggesting vBulletin. I pre-ordered the vBulletin publishing suite thinking that it would be a great combo of forum + cms. However there seems to be some problems with the vBulletin publishing suite and forum so I am not confident that it's the best solution anymore. The most important part of the CMS I need is the forum part. The rest of the CMS needs to be good as well though. I've been looking att UBB.threads which has many nice features but it seems like it is difficult to make it look good by skinning it. Maybe it will be better in th 8.0 version though. Invision powerboard may be another option. I like the Drupal CMS somewhat but I get the feeling that the frum isn't as advanced as the other options. So.. If you were to choose a forum + CMS solution, what would you choose and why?
But my mods have complained a bit that modding in minibb isn't as good as modding in vBulletin. So another important feature would be that the forum should be user friendly to mods. And it would also be nice to have one system for everything. Right now I have a seperate forum and a separate cms. And Currently my site isn't so well designed. I would take this opportunity to redesign it.
If Drupal forum too simple with your need, you can integrate with vBulletin. For your reference look at crackberry.com, a huge site based on Drupal integrate with vbulletin, the forum has more than 4.7 million posts and more than 2.2 million members
Crackberry.com probably uses the 3.x version of vBulletin though.. And the new version is 4.0, and that is the version that has problems.