I have a web site I'm building and the client wants to have features from vBulletin (blog, forums) integrated into the site. Its not enough to simply add the sites skin to vBulletin. Is there a way to do this?
I would expect there to be documentation on how, if it is possible, to do such a thing but haven't been able to find anything.
I'd rather not connect and query the vBulletin database directly.
After much research (see: cursing) I've found that external.php and blog_external.php do what I want though not quite as elegantly as I would like.
So if you want to incorporate forum threads into your web page then external.php is what you need. It appears to be a bit more customizable in that you can have it output in JavaScript, XML, RSS, and RSS Enclosure (podcasting).
If you want to incorporate blog posts you appear to be limited to RSS only. Like I said, less than ideal but at least its something.
There is more information here: http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/vboptions_group_external
There is no proper API for this yet, so you'd either have to rely on things like RSS, or query the database directly. RSS won't get you old data, nor any forum structures, etc. just basics of new data.