we recently upgraded our vb forum which had joomla integration, which served the landing page with announcements and recent activity. after considering IPB, we concluded that XF was decidedly superior for a number of reasons.
AFAIK, with XF, CTA-Ft addon is the easiest option if you want a portal-like front page that requires frequent news/happenings updates; there are also other features, which have been discussed in the main article and other reviews. our users like it - and we do too.
thanks brogan, for the excellent addon; and i confess that while we had already decided on XF, your addon helped seal the deal. apparently support is good (going by customer views); so far, we have managed easily with information in the main article and discussion-posts, without the need to log support. yet, i feel that a formal manual or user guide which takes newbies into consideration will help immensely and i suppose more people will consider buying it.