I noticed you are using Wordpress as your frontpage portal. Does that really help with SEO, I have heard that it might help and be better for SEO than say VB advanced. Any thoughts on this?

Question!! I want to know too...

And a supplemental question (to anyone who may know):

Having never really used wordpress, would it be very diffcult to integrate a custom vb style into wordpress?

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Wordpress is great for SEO ;)

As for the intergration, there is a mod at vb.org that will allow this.. I just haven't had time to set it up on vbsetup.

cheers

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Yup, wordpress is a very nice, organized way to have a frontpage for vBulletin.

I'm currently working on one for my site. It's pretty good with SEO, but if you search around you can get even more SEO tips for wordpress.

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As far as server placement, I would assume one would prefer to place the wordpress installation above the forum install. The site I'm building now, I have the forum installed into the folder "forum" in the root. In that scenario would it be best to install the wordpress into the root itself or would it be better placed in a "wordpress" folder in the root? I have a habit (call it ocd or whatever) of keeping my root nice and tidy and everything else in folders.

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Unless you want to redirect from root to subfolder for each user, my recommendation would be to setup the blog in root. However only do that if you are sure that you want to keep the blog as the home page of your site.

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I'm new to the whole "mixing a blog with a forum" thing, and this topic is what I'm looking for as well. I hope someone can give me some tips / quidance in this. I know there's no perfect solution, but your advice would help a lot.

As asked before, does one use the blog for the homepage, or the forum?
Do you integrate the blog & forum totally (not just the users), or not? What I mean with this is, if I post a blog post, should it automatically be posted to the forum as wel?
What do you use for the blog replies? The blog, or the forum?
Would / do you create the same categories in the blog as in the forum, or so you just use one category?

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I remember I was trying to integrate beginning of last year wordpress and vbulletin but no luck but I bet someone came up with a hack for wordpress and vbulletin on vbulletin.org

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I've been REALLY contemplating this over the last week or so and I might move forward with it. I am using vbAdvanced and while it's functional, it's very boxy and compartmentalized... I just feel like it looks like a 12 yr old put it together. I'd still keep it, to add pages to the forum (like our store that I hope will be going up sometime this year) but using it as a front page has lost it's luster for me.

We're planning on featuring articles, hints, tips and other content based upon certain themes /certain days which is more 'bloggish' to me but I still want it to look like a home page. We're a private forum so Google can't sign in and crawl anything... I need something that gives members a glimpse of what is on the forums and give spiders something to crawl.

Looks like I have some research to do, and I've never worked with WordPress before so that should be interesting. There is a mod at .org that will integrate vb and wordpress.