So I want to start a news site like macrumors.com where the forums are just as important as the front page articles. Using bbPress is the simplest and cheapest way to go. I think bbPress satisfies all my needs and there’s some excellent bbPress compatible Wordpress themes. However, is using bbPress going to put my site at a huge disadvantage in comparison to vBulletin? It seems like 95% of successful forums (100,000+ members) all use vBulletin. There must be a reason for that? I remember when bbPress launched many years ago I thought it was going to be huge it definitely isn’t right. What would you recommend that I use? Thanks!
you also mentioned that most successful forums are using VB. so how do you position your site? If you have decent traffic and members, VB is absolutely the best choice to make it better. bbpress is good enough in most cases for those small sites
bbPress is great for little forums for WordPress websites. Usually bbPress have some basic forum functionality, but you need to improve it with others plugins to get vBulletin features. Though bbPress is fully compatible with WordPress, for bigger forums projects I think vBulletin would be a better choice for now.
If you want tight integration with your wordpress site, definitely go for bbpress. Its easy to manage and you could spend the money you save for something else like hosting or CDN. bbpress as a forum is not the best one around. But its pretty much okay for most purposes. Now if you want to integrate other forum scripts, its possible for phpbb - http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-united/ for vanilla - http://wordpress.org/plugins/vanilla-forums/ for vBulletin - http://wp-vb-bridge.obscurecloud.com/ But wordpress may not be the best CMS for you - why not try out other CMS like Drupal, Joomla, Modx, Concrete5, SilverStripe etc..