Wriging

I use WordPress as both a CMS and blogging software. It's a really powerful CMS with a few plugins.

I've only done of a few forum installations in my time, and I usually lean toward phpBB.

I'd steer away from PHPbb as I've had ongoing spam troubles on a medium-sized board I run. Vanilla is delicious and something I've only started playing with.

And Wordpress I'll leave to the 40,000 WordPressers on this site. :)

bbpress is my #1 favorite community content infrastructure/application. I was skeptical when we first implemented it a year ago because it wasn't very mature back then, but the things it has allowed us to do are fantastic. We use bbpress to manage user registration and authentication, then apart from the default forum functions we also use it for a lot of other stuff which hasn't been taxing to add to the system.

If you are a programmer (or know php) go with bbpress. Mike is right that bbpress is expandable but Mike and Scrivs put a lot of work into getting it the way they want. From a non-programmer standpoint I look at bbpress and think "I wish it did this...".

If you aren't a programmer go with Vanilla. Scrivs and I used it for ScrivsTyme and I can tell ya it holds up well under high traffic. Helpful community. Out of the box Vanilla is easier for the non-programmer to use. Vanilla is also very flexible.

Stay away from phpBB because they have had too many security issues in comparison to other forums.

As far as favorites? I don't have one. I bounce between WordPress and Expression Engine depending on need. If I would put the community of WordPress and the flexibility of Expression Engine with a hook in with Vanilla - wow...yeah...I have to stop thinking about that.

CMS: Joomla!
Blogging: Wordpress
Forum: SMF

I just integrated Vanilla into a site. I like its simplicity, organization, and modularity. Its pretty easy to write your own extensions as well as modify pre-existing ones. I haven't tried bbPress mainly because I'm not altogether impressed by the demos I've seen.

As far as CMS/Blogging, I usually just end up writing my own because I like the amount of control I have over it. Otherwise, its pretty easy to put a blog frontend on any forum software (wrote one that imports the Vanilla-formatted text body).

CMS: WordPress
Blogging: WordPress
Forum: Vanilla

If I could actually ever "figure out" actual CMS software I'd look into it to run my static sites but they all seem WAY over complicated for what I use them for.

Mine
Mine
Mine.

Just under two years ago I decided I would remake my site in ASPNET so I've just been building it up with features I need. It's well organised and performs (in terms of people it can handle) better than anything I've ever used.

It hasn't been a short journey and before I open source it, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it's taught me a lot of techniques and practices.

CMS: WordPress
Blogging: Wordpress
Forum: bbPress/ Punbb

Punbb is great but you are a bit limited on modifications, unless you want to hack at the core code. The next version looks to be changing a lot of that though.

bbPress on the other hand does pretty much everything you can need and has a nice flexible templating system which means you can do even more.

I wish I had the skilz to brew my own... as I have MANY projects that would benefit from not having to find someone to code for me.

Too bad I suffer from "old dog" syndrome and find it EXTREMELY hard to pick up new "things". ;)

Movable Type for blogging, and Vanilla for forums :D

Just like Oli, I've been developing and running my own CMS for the past few years. Though, unlike Oli I'm maily using PHP and MySQL. Most of the hard work is done (php coding) and now I'm finishing it off with some CSS and Javascripting before I release it.

The problem is I don't set myself a deadline or goal. So I just keep adding more and more things to it. I have a feeling it might never be done. :P