the idea is to create a more appealing landing page for guests. a place where they can get a better idea of what is in the forums from a single page. The portal is an SMF mod that Rebel found, and I have always been curious about. I played with it a bit last night, and some more today.
the middle column is the last 20 posts to any forum, then the latest three posts from breaking news, and finally a number of articles that we publish manually. I just picked the first two out of the elections forum. the stuff on the left and right columns is just fun sort of stuff about the board and the people in it.