Most portal software is a security nightmare (*Nuke anyone?), and the add-ons plugins are often even worse. Besides that home-baking is ofter as easy as getting a CMS work the way you want. E.g. with some programming experience, one could easily write something that works better with e.d. Django.
Having a forum and a CMS one one site adds to the complexity, e.g. users will have to register at two places. It is often much easier to aggregate things like news from a forum to a simple website. Usually that can be done in 10 lines of code.
E.g. on one site we use this fragment of (somewhat ugly) code to show news from the forum on the main page of the website:
<?
$db = mysql_connect($db_host, $db_username, $db_password) or die ("Could not con
nect!");
mysql_select_db($db_name, $db) or die ("Could not select database!");
$query = "SELECT * FROM punbb_topics WHERE forum_id = 9 ORDER BY id DESC
LIMIT 10";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die ("Query failed!");
setlocale(LC_ALL, "nl_NL");
while ($line = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
echo "<b>" . date("d/m/Y", $line["posted"]) . "</b> ";
echo "<a href=\"$forum_url/viewtopic.php?id=";
echo $line["id"] . "\">" . $line["subject"] . "</a> ";
echo "(" . $line["num_replies"] . " reacties)<br>\n";
}
?>