How is SMF bad? Changing the theme is fairly easy. It has one of the best admin control panels (Xenforo's is pretty bad IMO). It's package manager is great as well. It also has an active community with extensive documentation on the software.
function antHash($string) {
$hash = md5($string);
$hash = substr($hash, 0, 8);
$hash = md5($hash);
return $hash;
}
This is not custom and this is still weak because it is md5. At least use sha1 with random salt if not on PHP 5.5 where the password_hash() function is available.
Just create an event in Navicat to take backups
for backing up wwwroot, look for a powershell script that does that
maybe something like: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/The-ultimate-backup-script-819e52ee