Customising, Templates and making VB 4 CMS fit within a certain brief
 

Right - bear with me on this folks!

I've recently been commissioned with developing an existing community website. The brief outlines several features and certain behavioural characteristics that must be implemented. The choice of software platform is paramount in the success of this brief. Therefore I am asking questions and researching several options but vBulletin is the starting point as the current website already uses VB v.3.6.x as it's forum software. The site is host to some 8000+ members and so getting this right first time is critical. Porting to another forum software would be (at best) a nightmare and at worse a complete failure, hence me starting here on vBulletin and asking questions of the community here for your help.

There are several key features that MUST be available in which ever software platform we ultimately choose to go with. These key features are:

• SEO-friendly links across the entire website
• Complete custom header/footer/content styles
• Static pages on the CMS-side of things
• Customisable layouts in both forum and CMS views
• Integration and mix&match content between both forum threads/post and CMS pages/content
• Ability to pull data from the forum (raw data from the database) and use it in custom functions and display that data in whatever style I choose
• Ability to 'wrap' third-party software into the website. For example, an onlline shop is a requirement in this brief. However, the style/layout MUST remain the same and familiar in order to have a website that flows and integrates with itself.
• The forum software MUST support custom fields/data input (more of that in a bit)
• Ability to support the jQuery library

With regard to the "custom fields/data":-
What will ultimately happen is each user of the forum will have the ability to change certain features (like turning them on or off). This information must be stored on a per-user basis. So if this information can be stored in each users forum profile then it would make managing that data much easier. For example, I know that v3.6.x uses the $vbulletin->somedata class to hold profile information about a user. I also know custom fields can be assigned to users but the data that would be stored would be quite long/complex. Most likely in a serialised PHP array. If this serialised array can be stored in a custom field without vBulletin messing it up then that would be an almost perfect solution.

With regard to "integration mix&match content":-
The user will have the option to see several 'boxes' on their screen at any one time. These boxes must be able to provide information from both the CMS-side of things and the forum side of things at the same time. The forum must run/work happily along side boxes that display CMS pages and vice-versa. The data pulled from these two areas will be formatted either in the traditional layouts or a custom layout will be applied depending on use.

With regard to "SEO-friendly links":-
The entire website must have user-friendly and search-engine friendly links. A link of example.com/forum/?p=16213 is of little use and looks ugly. WordPress, for example, can format all links site-wide into, for example, example.com/forum/post/post-title-example. .htaccess URI re-writing is possible on this website for this to happen but vBulletin MUST be able to generate these links automatically when generating content/pages/posts/etc.


There's quite a bit more yet but I'll start off with those fundamental questions and take it from there. Many thanks in advance for any help received. :)