A Pages Database can be anything that you want. We simply use it for our Blogs but you can use it for news articles, membership highlights, recipes, etc... We have a tutorial here on how to build a recipe database: https://invisioncommunity.com/4guides/pages/460_basics/building-a-recipe-section_360/introduction-r155/
To configure the Pages Database to post a forum topic for each record, you would just configure this tab here in your Database settings: