BobcatsPlanet upgrades following this season

Sometime between the end of this season and the NBA draft, I plan to make several changes to some of the software that runs BobcatsPlanet.
Some of the things that I'm considering are:
Changing the template - I'm about 98% sure that I'm going to do that, Since the Bobcats are moving away from orange as their primary color and going to blue, I'd like to do the same... plus blue is a little easier on the eyes.
Changing the forum software - I'm about 70% sure that I'm going to do this. Currently we're running SMF (Simple Machines Forum) which is open source and has nice features, but doesn't get indexed all that well by google. We get tons of hits from google on the forum front page, but in my opinion we should be getting more hits from google on individual threads. More hits from google = more members = more fun. I'm thinking of moving to vBulletin, its the forum software that you see most of the bigger or professional sites use. It has a gazillion add-ons. We're growing every day, so this offseason might be the best time to make the switch.
Changing the software that runs the front page and blog - I'm only about 25% sure that I'm going to do this. Currently our CMS is Joomla, but I've been doing some reading about another CMS (Drupal) and it sounds nice, but the thought of making that change gets me a little queasy. The thing thats making me consider it is that Drupal and VBulletin work great together.

If anyone has any opinions on any of these potential changes or would like to discuss features that they would like to see added to BobcatsPlanet this offseason, lets discuss it in this thread.

Whats that going to do to our post counts and rep counts and old posts because if you think of it there is alot of history went down in here since you first started this. I like the blue color sceme idea.... :g:

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Originally Posted by davcbow

Whats that going to do to our post counts and rep counts and old posts because if you think of it there is alot of history went down in here since you first started this. I like the blue color sceme idea.... :g:

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All forum posts and counts and rep would be transferred to the new software. No way I could give those up :)

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Originally Posted by ziggy

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Originally Posted by davcbow

Whats that going to do to our post counts and rep counts and old posts because if you think of it there is alot of history went down in here since you first started this. I like the blue color sceme idea.... :g:

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All forum posts and counts and rep would be transferred to the new software. No way I could give those up :)

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I'm proud of my 2400 posts :biggrin:

I guess my question then would be, what would having more plugins do to make our site any better than it is already? besides the google hits thing you mentioned..... :g:

I guess I don't know much about the formatting/software stuff involved here, but I REALLY like the format of the site. Having seen other forum sites, this really is the best I've seen. Even seemingly "professional" sites have really boxy and cheap-looking forum pages, but this one (despite the orange) is a lot easier on the eyes.

Thanks for the complement Muttley.
I'll make sure to listen to everyone's input before I make any changes.
I'm not a fan of 'boxy' either. If I were to make a change, I'd absolutely have to have a nice template on it and not the standard out of the box look.

Ziggy,

You surely know it better than me, but in my opinion we should keep the "simple machines forum" format. Everyone uses v-bulletin, so our website seems me so original. If v-bulletin is much more functional then do it. But if there are no such big differences, I modestly suggest you to keep it.

Ziggy- Let me know if/when you decide on if you want new designs or whatever and I can help you out. I have some good ideas for some new Bobcats Planet graphics... ;)

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Originally Posted by ammofan

Ziggy- Let me know if/when you decide on if you want new designs or whatever and I can help you out. I have some good ideas for some new Bobcats Planet graphics... ;)

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Will do. Thanks.