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

[montanakyle]

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

 

[WPcrew]

Requirements are pretty high, but I believe that Drupal can solve all this efficiently. Question is the budget appropriate considering the size and complexity of a project, and have you hired adequate team, capable for realization of a project.

About the forum, Xenforo is currently the best solution, so it's no wonder why all top sites just migrated to it. Xenforo doesn't have core integration for Drupal, and I really don't know if there's any module / addon available for the purpose. Vbulletin is a dead project for a while...

 

[kralcx]

Not sure if you're aware that in addition to the forum core module; there is also the advanced forum contributed module it may have what you're looking for.

 

[divok]

Tough wordpress has plugins for all it won't be good
You can do all the above functions with xenforo , vb with the help of user permissions etc .
for videos , blog , forum : -a single forum software will be sufficient .
while for dir , classified & new aggregator use wordpress

Still you will require custom coding to bridge all the aspects of the website .

 

[montanakyle]

Thanks for the replies guys. 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.