[fishbowl81]

to answer the 2nd part of your question:

Buddypress uses bbpress-live, which is an api interface for bbpress. If there is a api interface for vbulletin, it would be pretty straight forward to make an api interface for it.

It looks like there is an api, here is the code documentation:

http://members.vbulletin.com/api/

But, after a quick review, I don’t see anyway to read the forum posts?