CMS options

I run a fairly big stockmarket forum and am looking at taking it to the next level. (i.e. professional)

One of the great stumbling blocks I've run into is getting a professional looking CMS. I currently use Vbadvanced which is fine but I find a little amateurish looking, although that could just be because of my crappy design skills. :D

What I am interested in knowing is what are the options for CMSes based around a vbulletin forum and which option is the most professional? I have heard about a bridge between Joomla and Vbulletin but don't know if this has reached release stage yet.

Please tell me about your vbulletin CMS experiences. I am especially interested in hearing any success stories.

Also, I am very interested in finding out if there are any designers out there who specialise in CMS layouts. If so, I want to hire you!

I use vbadvanced and love it. If you design it well it can look very good. But, I know there are other very good cms's out there.

Subdreamer (www.subdreamer.com/) is a paid CMS that integrates with vBulletin. Having personally never used it, I cannot say anything about it but the few people I've run across who use it are happy with it.

I've done several CMS types, but in the end I have yet to find a good viable one to use with vB. The vBA one mentioned above is good and free, but I found either a bug or some issue with it not working for me with custom HTML code. That's the problem with most CMS, if you have a site or doing a site with a custom layout already done in HTML, issues start to crop up.

If anyone knows of good CMS besides vBA, even pay ones, feel free to post here because I would like to try them too.

Have you tried joomla?

Have you tried joomla?

Yes, it does NOT integrate well with vB at all! Look at the extensions for vB and Joomla. There are very few there and don't work when a new version comes out of vB. That's the problem with most CMS programs, if it does work some with integration and vB then when vB updates it gets broken. If the extension author REALLY supports it that's fine, but most ALL of them do not or it takes at least a few months or much longer if they do at all.

That's why I really shy away from CMS period. At least until I find something as heavily supported as vB itself. I'm thinking maybe some day the makers of vB will create a CMS and suppot it, that would be the best solution.