Hey there guys,
what I really would like to see in SMF 2.0 (or later versions) is some sort of Integration panel. I noticed there's a HUGE amount of posts and support required soley to integration with other bridges or just your plain PHP coded website :P.
It'd be nice to see some sort of panel in the admin cp just for integration options.
To be quite honest, at the moment I don't think SSI.php and smf_api.php are quite doing the trick to get the whole thing done.
Anyway, that's just my opinion though. Feel free to critisize!
Thanks :D
integration is not a part of the SMF base set up (and nor should it be)
Are you asking that 10 bridges be auto-installed with SMF base code and that there be an integration panel to activate them? No way... that is code that 90% of the SMF admins would never actually use, and hence, does not belong in the base release.
bridges exist to link SMF to other softwares... and a proper bridge should not modify anything in the base code...
SSI works perfectly to allow you to integrate your forum into other pages... but you are right, SSI by itself is not intended to be a bridge... (nor should it be)
If you want this kind of thing, why don't you go out to the software that have bridges for SMF and ask them to support auto-integration with SMF? If it's a big enough issue, they just might. Then you'd have your auto-integration and SMF would still be lightweight.
If/when you do contact developers of other systems about integrating their system with SMF, make sure you point them to the topic on SMF's integration hooks - http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=173483.0
Those hooks make integration much simpler.