Hey bud, responded to you over at my site. If you're lookin at using phpbb, a branch off of rockettheme, they focus 100% on a phpbb bridge @ www.rocketwerx.com.

To give you a heads up on SMF. Bridges are no longer supported for Joomla. Joomla has decided that the SMF bridge does not comply with their GPL license, leaving no access between the two. You would have to have dual logins for your site and boards. That's the problem I ran into.