Great job on the new board guys, SMF is a decent forum software, which as I'm sure you realized has a ton of options (some say too many, which makes customization a little overwhelming). My advice is to take your time with it, and keep a running list of tweak requests so you don't lose track of what you're doing. It's easy to work on one feature and get lost in the rabbit hole as you find out you can do many more things.
On another note, wasn't the previous site a wordpress site that you tacked vbulliten onto? Are we going to maintain the news/stories portion of the site, or will this just be a forum focus now? Did the hackers also compromise the blog portion of the last site?