Advice on Blog, Forum and CMS software for new website

[paul-003]

Looking for advice on which software to use for a website I'm currently thinking of starting up. The website would require a blog, a forum, a section listing about 10 areas each of which could have up to 200 businesses each which have to have a page with info about that company that users of the site can comment on and also a few other smaller sections with just information. Each of the businesses will also fall under a particular category eg business, engineering, accounting etc.

I'm currently thinking of building the site using CMS Made Simple as I've built a good few sites with it before and has always been very easy to modify and get the exact layout I wanted. Along with this I would install a forum software.

Any advice on potential software would be appreciated. My main 3 choices seem to be Wordpress, CMSMS and vBulletin.

Has anyone used the vBulleting CMS or Blog? - How powerful are they? Would they be able to able to handle the section on businesses?

Are there any good free alternatives to vBulletin or should I stick with vBulletin?

Wordpress - this site http://courses.itsligo.ie/ is done in WP and has the layout I'd like for listing the businesses but I'm not sure what plugin would do this??

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Paul

 

[Sinead Hanley]

I'm a great Joomla Fan - have you checked it out?

 

[paul-003]

tried it once but was very hard to figure out the styling of it and hard to get the layout how I wanted so I never went back to it. Joomlas own forum is powered by phpBB too??