Questions - evaluating whether vBa is for me

[convergent]

I have a large vB 2.3 site that has a portal front-end that is heavily customized and I need to find some way to replace as we migrate to vB 3.5. I have a couple of questions related to this migration, that will help me determine if vBa can do the trick for me.

I have had a custom skin developed for vB 3.5 that I will be using. The designer also did a preliminary design of a portal page. From my reading in the forums, it sounds like vBa just uses the vB skin and no additional skin development is required. Is that true?

Our site gets a fair amount of traffic and sometimes has over 1000 active users. Is there any issue with performance on busy sites with vBa. Back when I was putting the current site together, I found that one of the portal systems was coded such that it put a pretty heavy load on the database. The server currently is pretty stressed as it is, so I don't want to introduce a significant increase in database load. Comments?

Is it easy to remove vBa from a vB site if I find that it isn't going to work for us?

I have a few others, but lets start with these. Thanks.

[Brian]

By default, the CMPS will use the same style that a user has selected. There is no need to create an additional style for the CMPS, but there is also an option to force any page of the CMPS to use a specific style if you wish.
Normally the CMPS should not add too much extra strain on the server. The amount of strain it adds though does depend on the modules you have active. v2.1.0 (which will hopefully be released in a few days) also has quite a few new options and changes specifically focused towards optimizing the script for larger sites.
Uninstalling is just a matter of choosing the 'Uninstall' option from the install file, then removing the files you uploaded for the CMPS from your server.

[convergent]

Thanks Brian,

We had a successful upgrade last night from 2.3 to 3.5.3. I'm just about to download vBa and try it on our test site.

Being new to 3.5.3, I have another question. Is there a way to integrate some vBa functions into a subscription? I am not sure how subscriptions work yet, but I was hoping to have a different template used for subsription people that doesn't have ads, but might have some other stuff. Thus far, I don't see how to do it... figured I'd ask about vBa on the same topic.

If you have a moment, do you see any thing with the template we are using that may cause trouble for vBa? http://pdaphonehome.com . I would like to take the right margin and use it with vBa features like recent threads.

Will download and give it a test now.

[Chris-777]

.2c:

I had a pretty customized vBIndex portal before I went to 3.5, and honestly recreating everything in CMPS was not only easier than I thought it would be, the site looks/feels a LOT better on vBA than it did on vBIndex. CMPS is just a better all around portal as far as I'm concerned.

[Brian]

For the subscriptions, you can set those up to where they will change a member's usergroup. You can then change the permissions for any modules with the CMPS so that usergroup won't be able to view it.
I don't see anything obvious with your style that would create a problem, though I would assume that's a moot point since you said you got everything working properly. :)