OK, I spent another few hours trying to force the old hack code to work and just couldn't. So I have given in and have started recoding the entire page using the content island, which is a fair amount of work but I guess worth it in the end. At least this way my assistants can manage those lists in the control panel instead of having to wait for me to update config files.
You can see the new look here -
http://www.bellaonline.com/forum/ultimatebb.cgi my remaining two complaints are that
1) I still have that "title" on top of each content island. I'd rather just have the 3 posts show up in that area
2) I lost the cool icons next to each post
Any thoughts there?