I bet I wasn't the only one who was thrilled when I noticed that there was an actual beta release of PunBB 1.3. I downloaded and installed it immediately on my dev machine and I must say that it looks stunning!

Now to the problem:

I run a site where I've used PunBB as the forum software for three years now and during that time I've gathered 932 registered users, 772 threads and 8966 posts. However, I use Wordpress as the backend for the rest of the site and it works really well. The only thing that doesn't work well is the user integration between the two systems.

As of now, I don't use anything in Wordpress that require registration but as I'm in the middle of adding new features to the site that might have to change. But I don't want my visitors to register twice for the same site.

I've been browsing around for options for quite some time now and I think I've tried them all. Or at least a lot of them. Everything from plugin based forums like XDForum, Simple Forum, WP-Forum, RS Discuss to external ones with the ability to integrate user activity like BBPress and Vanilla. The only one I haven't tried is SMF, which I've read can be easily integrated into Wordpress with the Wordpress SMF Bridge Plugin. But I don't think I want to use SMF. It seems to bloated with unnecessary functions.

Basicly, my question is: Are there anyone developing a PunBB plugin similar to SMF or are there any plans from the PunBB team to make integration with blog software (or other software that require user registration) available to the public? Or should I start looking the other way for  an alternative to PunBB?

I could start from scratch with a completely blank forum with no registered users but it seems like such a waste. It'll be like erasing the last three years.

Eeeeek!