I'm wanting to add a forum to my site, and also eventually get to the point of giving readers full functionality to submit articles, friend each other, make a wish list, earn points, etc. Any suggestions on how to do this? I've heard vbulletin is the best forum solution, but I'm tempted to go with bbpress, since I'm also wanting to integrate buddypress eventually, and I figure they would probably work better together than maybe vbulletin/wordpress/buddypress would. Then again, the new version of vbulletin seems to have some pretty good functionality as far as user profiles and such go. Maybe I could use those profiles to create the social network I'm aiming for... Any suggestions?
The only real all-in-one script that exists to my knowing is vBulletin Suite. Look it up by paying a visit to their site.
I'm not looking to use Vbulletin's blog software though. I want to keep WordPress. I just need to add forums and community based profiles.
Then the best thing to do would be to look through WordPress' assortment of plugins that will help you accomplish this goal. I'll keep my eyes open since I'm a WordPress user myself.
From what I can tell looking at the new Vbulletin forums, all I really need to add is the ability for users to publish user-submitted articles that would appear on my WordPress site. How complex would this be to integrate?