Community Website with Vbulletin as the Core.

Hi ArchAngelz, welcome to Drupal :-D

Drupal and vBulletin can indeed get along. Things are, however, still in a relatively early stage and there is not yet a completely "perfect" solution - what is there is good and some options work very well, but each method is still being refined. Don't let this put you off though :-P Despite being a little rough around the edges, these solutions "do" work, and are steadily working towards perfection. Also - to my knowledge, no other CMSes of Drupal's quality/caliber yet have as seamless integration as Drupal. It looks like there are a few options for Joomla (1, 2), which I haven't tested myself - I recommend Drupal over other CMSes, though since the CMS is a secondary issue for your particular site, you might at least compare what Joomla offers (also, I'm not a fan of the current 1.0.x Joomla series - the better 1.5 version should be out soon). Off hand these integrations don't appear up to par with what Drupal has (and will have soon). Another completely different (and not free) option might be Subdreamer CMS, which appears to be focused on integration with popular forums. I have no idea if this actually works as advertised, so research first if it interests you.

Anyhow, back to Drupal! ;-)

Here are the options, in the order of my preference:
http://www.theoverclocked.com/drupaltin
http://drupal.org/project/drupalvb
http://www.vbdrupal.org

The differences between them are more complex than I can fully describe here (though I plan to write up a detailed comparison table soon, which will be posted at the Drupaltin site - I'm not the Drupaltin developer, just a member trying to help). I'll try to give a brief bit of reasoning though.

My top choice is Drupaltin... in a nutshell the reason for this is because it offers one primary feature that Drupal vB does not - fully functional bi-directional synchronization between Drupal and vB. What this means is that no matter if a change is made in Drupal or in vBulletin, the changes are synchronized both ways. Among other things, this is possible due to Drupaltin having a special vBulletin plug-in and several special add-in files that facilitate the process on vBulletin's side, while a Drupal module handles the Drupal side. The Drupaltin developer has had the benefit of being able to observe and study what was done with vbDrupal and Drupal vB, and build his ideal solution from the ground up, avoiding some of the pitfalls that came before. Though busy, the Drupaltin developer is the most "active" in his development at this time, compared to the other two options - have a look at the proposed features that are planned for the near and further future. On my testing server, Drupaltin works pretty much flawlessly - however it is absolutely brand new and should only be used on a live site for now at your own risk (my understanding is that there should be a beta or final stable release pretty soon). Also Drupaltin is the most challenging to install of the 3 for now (though Drupal vB is only slightly easier), as there is not an automated installer yet - the detailed instructions are a bit long, but easy to follow though.

My second choice is Drupal vB. Drupal vB is a great Drupal module - it's main shortcoming at this time is that the level of synchronization between Drupal and vBulletin is not as high (I'm not up to date on everything precisely right now - will have more info once I make a comparison table... one example is if a user logs out of vBulletin, they are not logged out of the primary site, and in a quick test tonight, I found logging in to either Drupal or vBulletin didn't always log me into both systems - could just be me). Like Drupaltin, Drupal vB's installation is slightly tricky, but not hard. Though the features are coming soon for Drupaltin, Drupal vB has some extra options and abilities, such as blocks with recent forum threads and stats, and a number of enhancements to the admin section. Drupal vB is a lightweight, Drupal-friendly solution though, worth considering.

My last choice is vbDrupal. The reason for this is that it is a Drupal "fork" - which means they had to edit Drupal's core files in order to make the system work. The result of this is that you have to rely on the developer(s) of vbDrupal to release new versions and security fixes "after" they are released for official Drupal. These changes have also lead to a variety of Drupal and vBulletin modules/plug-ins not working. Lastly, unlike Drupaltin and Drupal vB, there is not yet a Drupal 5 version of vbDrupal, and a release date is unknown (and if you are new to Drupal - I highly highly highly recommend version 5 over 4.7). Not all is bad however - there are benefits to vbDrupal over the other choices (though for me and many others, not worth the costs). For instance, with vbDrupal you can relatively easily use the same theme as vBulletin throughout your Drupal site, and you can load Drupal modules easily into the side bar of your forum (though I've found the performance hit in doing this to be immense).

Anyhow, hopefully this will help you make the best decision for your site. Enjoy!

-- Dave