vBulletin Publishing Suite Questions

[EGS]

I need help regarding vBulletin's new publishing suite.

I am looking for a complete content management system that can integrate with vBulletin, and obviously vBulletin Publishing Suite was made to do this, but I am looking for a CMS suitable for an e-commerce site/e-business. My site isn't about content and users interacting with content, so I have a few questions.

1. Would vBulletin Publishing Suite work well with an e-commerce site/e-business? Does it have shopping cart support and/or something similar to vBulletin's premium membership payment gateway (but instead to use within the site, not just memberships)?
2. Is it possible to install the CMS on the root directory and have vBulletin forum in its own separate directory?
3. In regards to the question above, can vBulletin Publishing Suite support sub-domains? I'd like to set up some directories to be used as sub-domains instead, and also even use my vBulletin forum & its directory as its own sub-domain.
4. Can HTML be used in the WYSIWYG editor for content?
5. Can PHP code be used in the WYSIWYG editor for content? What about templates?
6. With regards to the two questions above, how well can the WYSIWYG editor customize the look of pages and its content? What I mean is, obviously web pages will look different from one another, and will I be able to use images and structure the layout of a page with the WYSIWYG editor when creating and/or modifying web pages? I've noticed that it's impossible to structure a thread/post within vBulletin's editor when posting - you can't, for example, place content to the left and align an image to the right of the content, and obviously this would be important to do to create a web page, its structure, and its content.
7. Are there any sites that I can be linked to that use vBulletin publishing suite?
8. Would it be possible to create a web page that would display content according to a specified usergroup, as in like a dynamic web page where - if specified - every usergroup would see an entirely different web page/content than the other? (IE, guests see normal page, but like a member would have like welcome text with their username, their last activity, and maybe even like a special offer that only registered users can see opposed to guests?)
9. In terms of SEO, is there a way to set the meta description and title tag for each page within the CMS while creating/editing it? What about keywords?
10. Is there a sitemap.xml generator and static sitemap generator?
11. Is there a menu/navigational menu support?
12. Can it support directories and a hierarchy of directories, such as directory/directory etc?
13. Is there SE-friendly URLs? Can they be specified, ie page-name.html etc?
14. Is there tagging support?
15. Is there built-in shopping cart or payment gateways?

I think that's all the questions I need answered. Please, any & all help is greatly appreciated.

[thincom2000]

1. I don't believe so, vBulletin doesn't have shopping cart support and leaves it up to the site owner to integrate a third-party cart (except for paid subscriptions). If you are talking about a paid membership to see CMS content, this seems possible since you can define read access for each CMS page, but I haven't tried it.

2. Yes you can install the CMS in a different directory from the forum, by copying the content.php file to the appropriate location. You will have to edit the forum path in that file and the CMS path in the forum's index.php so that the two directories communicate properly.

3. You cannot install the CMS and forums in different sub-domains at the current time, unless you are using vBSEO. This is a planned default feature for vBulletin 4.1.

4. Yes you can use HTML in CMS page content.

5. You can't use PHP in CMS pages, and thus you can't call any vBulletin style templates, but you can do both for custom widgets that you create in the AdminCP.

6. Your pages are limited to within the page container, but since HTML can be used, how you lay it out within that container is extremely flexible. I would not recommend doing this in WYSIWYG mode, unless you are using tables for layout. In WYSIWYG mode, you can align images relative to your text.

7. Personally I just use it as an article system. I'm not aware of any sites that do anything special with it, though the potential is there.

8. You can't create static pages or articles that change their content based on Usergroup, but you can change which static pages and articles appear based on Usergroup.

9. Yes you can customize the title tag, meta descriptions, and keywords for each node in your CMS (sections, articles, etc).

10. From what I can tell vBulletin has its own sitemap generator, but I use the vBSEO Sitemap Generator.

11. Yes the CMS comes with various navigation widgets (categories, sections).

12-13. Every CMS page can have a custom URL defined. I have not used this personally but in theory you should be able to use any URL you want, as long as you specifically define the URL. Otherwise it will use something bland.

14. There is tagging support in the CMS via "categories". It doesn't use the same tagging system as threads.

15. This seems like the same as #1.