Creating CMS MS + phpBB portal

[yogesh]

Hi every one, I have a month old phpbb board www.bcmtouring.com with ezportal frontend.

Now I want to integrate few more sections on my forum to make it more of a portal. After looking into other CMS’s like Joomla and Mambo I have reached a conclusion that they are too complex for me and provide features which I don’t intend to use. After getting recommendations at www.sitepoint.com I thought of giving CMS MS a try, here is what I am looking for in a CMS package.

My site will be driven mainly by forum and I would like to keep phpbb, on the front page I should be able to display recent topics with an ability to choose the placement of the recent topic block.

CMS should be able to gel with the forum to provide a uniform look, much like this site. I would like to build a similar interface for my site, with priority on functionality and readability. I don’t want any fancy graphics or overload users with too many manus; I want to create a simplistic portal that can be browsed easily.

The main function for the CMS on my site would be adding articles, product review and news pages, all this would be created by me and there won’t be any members only section in the portal, thus I don’t need to integrate the DB of the forum with CMS.

I believe placing adsense ads would be easy, just by editing the template, right?

Also I would like to add a photo gallery, which should be able to produce [img] tags which could be used by the forum members.

I did see you have a module called phpbbx, has any one integrated into their site? If so can you please provide me with a link so I can see how it looks?

One last thing, I love to keep all my sw’s updated, so I always install updates asap, would this be a cause of problem in a portal like this?