Building new site, need suggestions in Gallery integration..

[number six]

Hey everyone! Long story short my old site took a header when my -previous- webhosting provider (iPower grrr) migrated servers. iKonboard couldn't take it and died. So i'm starting from scratch, the only thing I'm locked into is SMF as my forum.

So here's what I need to do. Besides a forum my site will have user galleries (its an arcade/pinball collecting site, so galleries for collections). The goal is integrating SMF with a front end CMS and also some sort of gallery software all tied to one login/account.

First I tried Mambo, the SMF->Mambo bridge seems to work fine. On the flip side integrating a gallery program with Mambo hasn't be so easy. The plugin modules are all missing something (many wont allow you to assign specific user permissions for individual galleries for example). Trying to integrate coppermine or gallery into mambo has so far also been a pain.

Joombla I gave up on when I found out about the Joombla/SMF split. No point in looking at it if its not going to link with my forum.

I just tried e107 and like it, but from what I'm reading the bridge doesn't support authentication from e107 into SMF (if i'm reading things correctly) so it really wouldn't be all that integrated.

The last thing I thought about was just hosting the gallery in SMF with the Pro version of the SMF Gallery plugin, but without being able to find an admin demo i'm a bit leary of dropping $50 on something that may end up being not as good as Coppermine or Gallery.

Anyway I thought I'd ask what everyone's suggestion was, i'm totally open.. the only constant is SMF. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious but I haven't worked with any CMS software since a site I did in Nuke years ago..

[Owdy]

Coppermine integrates nicely in SMF. I use that without problems. Other option could be http://galleryproject.oldiesmann.us/