Publishing or classic
 

I'm trying to figure out if I really need publishing or will forum 4.0 be enough. from the feature list I see that the main difference between the two is the cms system. I will not utilize the blog or article feature but I do need a front page to display info such as: recent post, question of the day that will be answered in the forum, weekly polls, and comment of the day. Do I need publishing to get this information and show it or is the code open source where I can create my own php scripts to show this data? Is there any part of the code that is encypted or inaccessible?

Thanks for the help.