In case you hadn't heard, Joomla 1.5.10 looks to be ready soon.

Keep an eye on the Joomla Forum Announcements board for details and upgrade instructions.

So i was surfing the Joomla Developer site today and came across Andrew Eddie's blog about Joomla 1.6 and some of the new functionality. The 2 main things coming in this major release is going to be the way extensions are stored in the database and access controls. He didn't go into the packages to much just said:

"this will ultimately make it easier for developers to make multi-installable packages.  I'll let Sam blog about this more at another time.".

This is somethign really great that will save us all a lot of time if I am understanding him correctly. I interpret it to mean that we will be able to install a "Package" instead of having to install multiple componenets, modules, and plugins for certain extensions. Maybe Sam will be able to clear this up for us.

So to give you some perspective, I've been trying to implement a seamlessly- integrated forum on this site for about 2 months now. I first started playing with it over the Christmas holidays and have been experimenting with it off-and-on ever since.

The problem is that I have been spoiled by the relative ease of integrating the SMF forum into Joomla 1.0. There is a very good extension available on that platform and, despite having to hack the core, it works near-flawlessly. Once i did some custom coding to have the forum URLs rewritten to be huma-readable, I was in the money. If you've ever been to the JCal Pro forums, you'll know what i am talking about. 

Based on my past experience then, here are the minimum requirements for a properly integrated forum: